This market is pure crap. So the rich (who can afford to be green) get to pollute, and the poor (who are struggling even while polluting) do not?

It's the same as the medieval church practice of selling indulgences which allowed people to sin.

Here's an idea - save your money and just quit polluting. Or pass stricter laws that punish pollution. But don't tell rich people to go on polluting and tell poor people they can't.

Well I just totally sucked in a microeconomics course this semester but I believe this is simply an economic issue.

We're talking about corporations that generate profit and that which the government taxes. Forcing every corporation to emit zero pollution will crash the market and then you have a very unhappy government. That won't happen.

Also forcing every corporation to cut their emissions by a flat amount is also completely uneconomical. It would result in a loss of total economic surplus. You can simply see it as both well off and not so well off companies being treated as equals. One has more money, one has less. A flat amount will hurt one side while benefiting the other. Total economic surplus would suffer, that is, the total surplus of all corporations effected by the pollution cut would be less than using a more economical method.

So the best options in current theory are to either sell or auction off pollution permits, or in other words, a tax on each ton of pollutants. It's best to just quote my textbook at this point.

"The advantage of the tax approach is that it concentrates pollution reduction in the hands of the firms that can accomplish it at least cost. Requiring each firm to cut emissions by the same proportion ignores the fact that some firms can reduce pollution much more cheaply than others."