It’s like a tax paid up in advance. The government can create carbon credits out of thin air, they sell them to you, you get to emit without breaking the law /

It’s like a tax paid up in advance. The government can create carbon credits out of thin air, they sell them to you, you get to emit without breaking the law / getting fined. The government decides how many to create, and sets the price that way because the market decides how much being able to emit carbon is worth. The incentive is not to have to pay for them. Reduce your emissions, improve your bottom line. Simple as that. This isn’t an offset scheme but you can buy some kinds of offset credits and use them like the basic emissions credits as essentially a license to emit. But I think there’s some rethinking of offsets as a whole concept going on, a realisation that they’re actually not producing real results and just enabling emitters to keep going longer and more cheaply. If the claimed offset is not realised, then this is a massive net loss because of the lost time spent propping up emissions. So your offset efficacy has to be really high to be tenable, but while estimates vary, the harder we look at them, the closer to 0% effective they appear to be.