Would people understand "negative resource" more easily than "cap and trade"?

I heard on the radio that the public is having trouble understanding the idea behind cap and trade as a way of controlling greenhouse gases. The idea is really not so difficult. The government sets a limit on greenhouse gas emission. An industry that goes under the limit gets credits according to how far under they go, and these credits can be sold to other industries to offset their emissions.

So here is my alternative way of describing cap and trade. Greenhouse gases are considered a negative resource. The amount of this resource that a company has is found by subtracting the limit from how much greenhouse gases a company produces. If the company goes under the limit then it has a negative amount of the resource, which can be sold to another company. This company adds the negative resource to its emission amount, which lowers its emisssion numbers.

On second thought, the people who don’t understand cap and trade are probably the same ones who do not understand negative numbers, so this may not help. Maybe if we called it a red resource it would help, where red indicates debit on a balance sheet.