If carbon credits are implemented without massive fraud, I don't think it's fair to call them indulgences. If enough people bought carbon credits under a working system it would be a flood of money toward restricting carbon release and recapturing carbon.
Carbon credits most probably are a massive fraud. First it is unclear what measures each credit you buy will take to capture/reduce/limit carbon. Then, those credits are too cheap to have any plausible benefit. Even staunch fans usually introduce them with "well, its something, its a start".
I think carbon credits are a scam in the same stage recycling was 20 or 30 years ago.
Carbon credits are issued to companies in the industry based on a certain amount they are allowed to pollute. This is the cap, the credits are the trade, in "cap-and-trade". However, all that pollution still gets polluted in the end, the only thing that changes is who does it, and who pays. Other players can enter the market and claim to absorb carbon, but very often these people are just monetizing ecosystem services that were already happening before they showed up.
If the cost of the credit was of the same value as removing the pollution, sure. This doesn't happen, though. Like sin, the credit doesn't undo the pollution, it just forgives it. The world still gets more polluted either way.
> Carbon credits are issued to companies in the industry based on a certain amount they are allowed to pollute. This is the cap, the credits are the trade, in "cap-and-trade". However, all that pollution still gets polluted in the end, the only thing that changes is who does it, and who pays.
The baseline is that all the credits are being bought by industrial polluters. If you personally buy a credit, industry has to pollute less. If you buy 1.5 credits for every credit-worth of extra pollution you cause, the pollution in the world is reduced. In theory.
> The world still gets more polluted either way.
The more credits people buy and sit on, the less pollution there can be. At first this is all low hanging fruit, but eventually the price gets so high that it's cheaper for industries to pay for carbon capture than to pay for credits. If enough are bought, and the price of credits goes high enough, total regulated pollution drops to zero or even goes under zero.
That's not an indulgence if you can minimize the loopholes.
