WSJ - A French chemical industrial giant, Rhodia SA, is reaping a potential billion-dollar windfall under a United Nations program intended to spur climate-friendly investment in the developing world, highlighting the challenges of using market forces to tackle global warming.

The U.N. system is designed to use market mechanisms -- the trade in credits -- to curb emissions in the developing world without stunting those countries' economies. In the program, polluters in rich countries buy credits, effectively paying for the privilege of continuing to emit greenhouse gases. The money is meant to flow to poorer countries to develop clean-air technology -- for instance, an African nation would get a financial incentive to build windmills instead of a cheaper, but dirtier, coal-fired power plant.

The company, Rhodia SA, manufactures hundreds of tons a day of adipic acid, an ingredient in nylon, at its factory here. But the real money is in what it doesn't make. The payday, which could amount to more than $1 billion over seven years, comes from destroying nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, an unwanted byproduct and potent greenhouse gas. It's Rhodia's single most profitable business world-wide. Last year, destroying nitrous oxide here and at a similar plant in Brazil generated €189 million ($300.5 million) in sales of pollution "credits."

Rhodia's experience shows that even a major Western industrial company can cash in on the pollution-trading program. The Rhodia factory in Onsan, South Korea, alone is slated to bring in more money, under the U.N.-administered program, than all the clean-air projects currently registered on the continent of Africa.