[hedora]

I thought the same thing, but none of the carbon sinks listed in the database are offset companies. They are all actually producing biologically stable physical chunks of fixed carbon.

Incidentally: We own some trees that we will not cut down, but that would not have been cut down by others.

There is a scam carbon offset site that will pay us for each year we don’t cut down an existing tree (if I remember right, it’s the biggest carbon offset market; can’t remember the name, but that’s not important, if you care, I’m guessing one of the articles in the comment I am replying to names and shames them).

Is there a tax efficient way for me to sell scam carbon offsets, then funnel the money into actual carbon capture businesses? How much would the brokers take?

(Or, better, is there a set of criteria that could be encoded into law to shut down the offset scam industry?)

[Reason077]

What if I bought up a bunch of coal on the open market, and sold carbon offsets against it? For each offset sold I’d bury the corresponding coal again, permanently preventing it from being burned.

Seems like this could be quite profitable, especially since I can sell 2.86 tonnes of carbon offsets for each tonne of coal.

Perhaps we could go a step further, skip the intermediate steps, and just pay coal miners to leave the coal in the ground?