Distributed clouds have recently attracted many cloud providers and researchers as a topic of intensive interest. High energy costs and carbon emissions are two significant problems in distributed clouds. Due to the geographic distribution of data centers (DCs), there are a variety of resources, energy prices and carbon emission rates to consider in a distributed cloud, which makes the placement of virtual machines (VMs) for cost and carbon efficiency even more critical than in centralized clouds. Most previous work in this field investigated either optimizing cost without considering the amount of produced carbon or vice versa. This paper presents a cost and carbon emission-efficient VM placement method (CACEV) in distributed clouds. CACEV considers geographically varying energy prices and carbon emission rates as well as optimizing both network and server resources at the same time. By combining prediction-based A* algorithm with Fuzzy Sets technique, CACEV makes an intelligent decision to optimize cost and carbon emission for providers. Simulation results show the applicability and performance of CACEV