[myrmidon]

I think this example illustrates the biggest problem with carbon credits very clearly: Basically, Meta subsidises all the electricity consumers near that plant to take the blame for the emissions that their datacenters cause.

This achieves almost nothing: Emissions stay the same, no additional clean power is generated and there is no reduction in power consumption either.

The only notable result is that Meta is now "blameless" on paper.

As long as you can get carbon credits cheaply from peers that don't really need/profit/care about them, the whole scheme is rather useless.