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Usually, rather than just planting trees, carbon offsets do things like replacing inefficient equipment or processes in developing countries. There's a lot of low hanging fruit that can be decarbonised / reduced significantly with a little bit of investment.

Over time these low hanging fruit will all be picked resulting in an increase in the cost of carbon offsets.

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Oh sure, trees is just the dumb go-to example/explanation for whatever reason. I don't think that changes my point there though? You can also do more of 'replacing inefficient equipment or processes' without it excusing some new extra pollution or whatever as though a zero-sum 'carbon neutral' is what's ultimately desirable.

I just think it's fun to think of DDG in this scenario looking at it like Oh we bought too much carbon offset, now we're carbon negative, we have a nice lot of negative carbon on our books, instead of issuing bonds let's raise some cash reducing our negative carbon assets.

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