Australia enters the era of carbon as a commodity

The Clean Energy Future legislation has passed into law, and now that the infrastructure and timeline to creating a market-based mechanism for pricing carbon emissions is reality, so begins the era of carbon as a commodity. Liable companies will need to offset their emissions with permits sourced on the open market from 2015, and firms are looking to source, originate, and trade those offsets to meet that demand. To those professionals, carbon offsets begin to resemble a commodity or a currency - tradable, able to be securitized and a source of potential return to participants in a number of ways.