I’ve got a funny feeling that the author didn’t really understand how offsets are supposed to work. Consider the example of all the rain forests. Assume they’ve

I’ve got a funny feeling that the author didn’t really understand how offsets are supposed to work. Consider the example of all the rain forests. Assume they’ve all been sold off, but we still haven’t reduced carbon in the atmosphere. So far so bad, but given that, there are still going to be emitters left who’d like to keep emitting. To do that, they’ve got to bid the price of credits up. But any owner of credits that wants to sell now has to find a way to reduce emissions so they can sell. As the price of credits goes up, the incentives become reducing emissions to profit from selling credits. It’s trying to align firm’s desire to profit with reducing emissions.