Carbon credits - the modern version of indulgences
A little history lesson:
In the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) basically ruled the world. If you didn’t believe and adhere to their rules, your soul was damned and you were going to hell.
At that time, the RCC began a policy of selling religious services to the rich (the priest would read specific Bible passages, fast, or do some other type of service). This eventually developed into the selling of indulgences. Indulgences allowed you to shorten your time in purgatory (the more money you spent, the less time). Purgatory, for the non-RCC here was the place one spent between death and heaven to pay off one’s sins - it wasn’t as bad as hell, but… Incidentally, the RCC will tell you an child who has not been baptized will go to purgatory if they die.
It seems to me that selling carbon credits is the modern version of selling indulgences.
Indulgences didn’t change anything except for making the RCC even more wealthy. I highly doubt that anyone who bought an indulgence spent less time paying for their sins after death. In fact, I’ll hazard a guess that rich sinners just paid off their sins and didn’t change their ways and perhaps even sinned more.
Carbon credits strike me the same way - if you want to have a large carbon footprint, pay someone else for part of theirs. I’ll hazard a guess here that it’s not going to reduce the world carbon footprint.
Both indulgences and carbon credits are sales of an intangible item without a true monetary value.
Essentially both equate to the same thing - the ruling class taxing people for doing something they deem as “bad”.
Hmmm, committing the oldest of sins in the newest of ways…