clipped from: blogs.wsj.com 
Today, even as Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is urging Congress to adopt greater financial-market regulation, another Capitol Hill hearing room is full of concern about another market subject to price gyrations: the carbon market.
Just as sketchy home mortgages set the stage for the subprime mess in U.S. banking markets, sketchy environmental initiatives threaten to create a “subprime carbon” mess, environmental group Friends of the Earth warned today. If correctly valuing McMansions was tough, how hard will it be to properly price the environmental benefits of a Mongolian wind farm, or other measures meant to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases? Carbon permits are still derivatives, after all.