> My understanding was that that was only in the beginning, when the system was introduced. Businesses that previously polluted for free could continue to pollu

> My understanding was that that was only in the beginning, when the system was introduced. Businesses that previously polluted for free could continue to pollute for free for a transitional period. I may be wrong. You are wrong: https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/allowances_en https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/allowances_en The free allowances are declining slowly, but there's no plan whatsoever to discontinue them. > Do you have a good source to read up on this? It's a complicated issue, but roughly things like this can happen: You can get extra certificates if you can show that you funded some kind of climate project somewhere outside of the EU ETS. This is called Clean Development Mechanism. Then you could do something like this: fund a particularly bad industrial plant that creates severe emissions of highly potent greenhouse gases. Then you create a CDM project to reduce these emissions again. You get emission certificates for a plant that you only built dirtier in the first place. Plenty of such schemes have been done in combination with HFC 23 (a very potent greenhouse gas that gets created in some industrial processes), wikipedia is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Development_Mechanism#Destruction_of_HFC-23 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_Development_Mechanism#De... For HFC 23 this loophole has been closed. But there are plenty more such problems. Further reading, there's an NGO focused on such issued called Carbon Trade Watch: http://www.carbontradewatch.org/ http://www.carbontradewatch.org/ My examples are a bit dated, because it's been a while when I was following it in detail. But it's a weird system that's so corrupted by lobbying that it hardly does any good.