[PavleMiha]

Carbon offsets are super complicated, potentially shady, and I don’t fully understand them, but the gist of it is that they pay money to companies to either not produce carbon that they otherwise would have, or use the money to install and operate equipment in factories and powerplants that captures carbon before it goes out into the world. You can also do things that pull carbon out of regular air but I think the first two options are so much more efficient that they dominate the market. It seems like the system could be gamed, but as far as I know it broadly works.

[basisword]

>> Carbon offsets are super complicated, potentially shady, and I don’t fully understand them

How can you judge them while openly admitting you don’t understand them?

[peyton]

There are clear perverse incentives and well-documented abuses.

[yywwbbn]

I think they are purposefully confusing to obfuscate the fact that offsets are primarily a PR mechanism