For some reason I thought it was a plan treat carbon emissions as something that could be traded. So if I have a factory and lowering my carbon emissions would cost me $5000 per ton/day and you had a different type of factory that could lower it's emissions for $1000 per ton/day I could sell you my emissions for a negotiated price (in this example, let's say we settled on $1400 per ton/day) and you can lower your emissions and I can keep chugging along. The same amount of carbon is in the atmosphere but it only cost $1400 per ton/day and you got to pocket some money to make your factory run cleaner.

I understand now that it is much more complicated than that but I like the idea of what I thought it was.