Offsets aren't really a scam, though they are essentially unregulated. Certainly if you tried to scale the existing industry rapidly by throwing money at it yo

Offsets aren't really a scam, though they are essentially unregulated. Certainly if you tried to scale the existing industry rapidly by throwing money at it you'd create scams. But regulation isn't an impossible thing. Another answer is that you just don't include offsets in the tax at all, at least at the start. You tax the extraction or importation of burnable carbon. So gas wells pay $X per ton of carbon they ship, oil refineries pay $Y per ton of carbon they pull off a tanker, etc... Then when someone comes by with a specific technology for capture/sequestration/offset/whatever, you make a regulatory decision that such a process is legal and pay them back $Z per ton of carbon verifiably sequestered.