Carbon offsets would only work if the sequestration strategy is permanent, which implies doing waaaaay more than any of these joke offerings can do. Like… plant entire new forests that will never be developed. Ever.
Like recycling, it’s also mostly a PR thing to take the perceived onus for addressing a problem that’s fundamentally caused by how industry is organized and shift it into individual consumers - who will never succeed at addressing the problem because the interventions are inherently inadequate.
And yet, in the US our politicians will still tout carbon offsets or carbon credits as if they are a solution to anything. The PR realizes that carbon-credits or carbon-offsets are bullshit the public has started to pickup on, so now they use “carbon capture” or “net-zero carbon.” But make no mistakes, there isn’t an environmental party that exists in the US, or anywhere else for that matter.
“President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act features substantial improvements to the federal Section 45Q tax credit for the capture and geologic storage of CO2, which provides additional incentives to help enable wide-scale project deployment.”
These are subsidies to the Energy Sector btw.
