Oregon’s carbon offsets go up in smoke

The Bootleg Fire is more evidence that markets can’t solve the climate emergency.

The theory behind carbon offsets is that markets created the climate emergency, so markets will solve it. It’s a kind of high-stakes denialism, like a lifelong smoker switching to “light” cigarettes after learning they have stage four lung-cancer.

The climate emergency owes its existence to market doctrine: that firms should manage their affairs to maximize shareholder value, irrespective of the costs that maximization imposes on everyone else.

By that logic, all corporate crime is the result of “poor incentives” — maimed workers, ruined neighborhoods and toxic spills are the results of underpriced insurance, or fines that are set too low.

Rather than criminalizing the conduct that leads to these outcomes — shutting down companies that engage in the conduct, holding managers and shareholders personally liable for it — market doctrine insists that we should “rebalance the incentives.”

Enter carbon offsets: rather than prohibiting the pollution that will render our planet permanently uninhabitable by our species, we make that pollution economically disfavorable, by offering bribes to companies that promise not to pollute.