Carbon markets currently make no sense. They are mostly there to allow politicians to say they are fighting climate change while not having to do anything poss

Carbon markets currently make no sense. They are mostly there to allow politicians to say they are fighting climate change while not having to do anything possibly unpopular. The reason carbon markets make no sense? They don't have a supply curve. This is why politicians have to set the price artificially. The supply should be provided by carbon sequestration projects. You emit 1 ton of carbon and pay for 1 ton of carbon to be sequestered from the atmosphere. The problem of course is that carbon sequestration is incredibly expensive so the price of emitting would be unaffordable. The incentives to cheat would be massive, it would be incredibly difficult to enforce. In theory this would spur a technological arms race to develop the most cost effective and large scale way to sequester carbon from the atmosphere, but the world economy would likely collapse before that panned out. It's kind of a shame we didn't YOLO this however, because once the techs were finally developed then we could just throw money at reversing climate change and that's something people would be so happy to do. People love easy solutions that don't demand a lot of time and attention. Fossil fuels are only cheap because we are blithely ignoring the externalities, unlike every green alternative.