Offsets are a promise to get rid of carbon for a price. There is a strong incentive to cheat and make the promise, collect the money, then do less than you promised to do. No matter what accountability mechanisms you create, eventually someone will fail to be completely honest, and will deliver cheap offsets as a result. The result is good prices. Eventually the failures of the market to actually deliver on their promise will become a scandal, but those scandals take a long time to materialize so we won't hear about it for a long time.
Which means it might or might not work, and we probably won't hear much about it if it doesn't.
The result? In the two large scale programs that have evaluations, the results were that 85% of efforts undertaken under the Clean Development Mechanism were likely ineffective, and 75% of those under Joint Implementation likewise were.
And yet, despite documentation of how ineffective those programs are, do you hear a lot of public scandals about ineffective carbon offsets?
Between perverse incentives and the history of failure, I do not expect future programs to do better. Nor do I expect to hear much about the failures that I think are going on.
Offsets are a promise to get rid of carbon for a price. There is a strong incentive to cheat and make the promise, collect the money, then do less than you promised to do. No matter what accountability mechanisms you create, eventually someone will fail to be completely honest, and will deliver cheap offsets as a result. The result is good prices. Eventually the failures of the market to actually deliver on their promise will become a scandal, but those scandals take a long time to materialize so we won't hear about it for a long time.
Which means it might or might not work, and we probably won't hear much about it if it doesn't.
Making this less hypothetical, go read https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconv... for some investigative reporting on how often carbon offsets aren't actually doing what is promised.
The result? In the two large scale programs that have evaluations, the results were that 85% of efforts undertaken under the Clean Development Mechanism were likely ineffective, and 75% of those under Joint Implementation likewise were.
And yet, despite documentation of how ineffective those programs are, do you hear a lot of public scandals about ineffective carbon offsets?
Between perverse incentives and the history of failure, I do not expect future programs to do better. Nor do I expect to hear much about the failures that I think are going on.