The job of the carbon offset is one or more of the following:
- Assuage guilt
- Virtue signal (personal, political, or corporate)
- Profit financially from government incompetence
- Profit financially from corporate PR efforts
We absolutely need a working market to meet decarbonization goals for a stable climate. The state of the current market means there's a lot of opportunity for improvement.
Many people say that markets fundamentally can't do that. If you think a market can, could you explain? (If they can, that would by far be the easiest coördination approach: we understand markets quite well.)
I don't see why a market can't do it. Carbon dioxide is invisible, mostly useless gas, and it's currently emitted by most cars, planes, trains, and factories. The accounting needs to happen somewhere, markets seem good at that.
Above I said "we absolutely need a carbon market", and I'm open to dropping that. It's possible markets are not the most effective option but I'm kind of short on how else to solve it. To someone who says that markets "fundamentally can't", I would ask them what solution they prefer instead, I'm open!
To maintain a stable climate we need to decarbonize rapidly. A carbon market is a potential solution for rapid decarbonization that so far is not working great.
The job of the carbon offset is one or more of the following: