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Comment by neverrroot | Hacker News Reader

About as useful as the carbon credits themselves

Curious if you could elaborate? It seems like the issue isn’t carbon credits, but the lack of a regulated level of carbon that would make them effective. Market incentives work best with dollar incentives, not virtue points.

I am no specialist, but carbon credits seem like they can work to me. The problem is they need to be very carefully analyzed. Here in Brazil there have been cases of people illegally seizing protected forests (far off in Amazon regions) and making huge amounts of money selling off carbon credits simply for 'not taking the forest down' (it could be even worse: taking down the forest for even more 'reforestation credits'). Usually most of those 'pay someone not to pollute' can be very problematic, because in principle anyone can declare (misleading) intent to pollute any amount and thus could get infinite credits.

So this kind of scenario has to be carefully taken into account in favor of scenarios which lead to actual emission reductions. It's not a simple fungible asset or commodity as some (naively) assume.

I interviewed with a company a few years ago that offers people the ability to certify their carbon free generation in countries where there isn’t a regulated market (I.e. outside of the US, EU, etc.). I was pretty shocked by the low standards of proof required, and it’s fairly obvious that someone can seek accreditation from multiple competing certifying agencies.

These unregulated credits get bought by heavy consumers in greenwashing

Carbon credits are useless for the same reason that non-proportional fines are also useless; for the incredibly wealthy the cost of speeding is the cost of the ticket. Some nations do a proportional speeding fine based on income - but that still doesn't affect the 1-0.1% whose wealth is more asset than income based.

That was effectively my point. There aren't appropriate dollar incentives to make the "market solution" work. It's really just a feel-good or virtue-signaling apparatus, not a financial market solution.

Yeah, not trying to steal your thunder, but adding to it. :)

> Curious if you could elaborate?

The vast majority of carbon credits issued are fraudulent:

> Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless, analysis shows

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed...

> A Shell-operated plant reported millions of carbon credits tied to CO₂ removal that never took place but were used by Canada’s largest oil sands companies

https://archive.is/xH4NE

https://www.ft.com/content/93938a1b-dc36-4ea6-9308-170189be0...

That seems to point to a problem with administration than the mechanism itself. It's like pointing to the fraud surrounding PPP loans and concluding the government shouldn't provide assistance in an emergency.

I think that was the joke

Yes, that was the joke.

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