Maybe such cases. And it couldn't be easier. No one really cares about the actual carbon. Everyone just wants a piece of paper for as cheap as possible.

It's kind of weird to see this being published here now. Hacker News probably largely doesn't pay attention to the NBA, but there's a scandal right now whereby Steve Ballmer seems to have used a carbon credit company called Aspiration that was a pure scam and performed no actual offsetting of carbon usage in order to circumvent the salary cap, making investments into the hundreds of millions of dollars into this otherwise sell-nothing, do-nothing company so they could then give out do-nothing endorsement contracts to basketball players that didn't actually endorse them.

Makes me wonder how many other companies if not entire industries largely exist for money laundering and don't otherwise actually do anything.

> Their prices are completely made-up since we don’t have the technology to remove carbon

All prices are made-up. We pay in currency which lacks intrinsic value, and simultaneously multiplying or dividing all the numbers by ten wouldn't effectively change anything.

Moreover, we aren't really "pricing carbon" in the first place; we're placing a Pigouvian tax on polluting. It's not as if someone will pay (or be paid) to take the carbon off the producer's hands. In fact, as you highlight, there is no consumer who could do so.

Moreover, "technology to remove carbon" is completely irrelevant to setting the level. Determining the right level is the same kind of optimization problem as price discovery, but it's neither based on supply-and-demand for the carbon itself, nor on compensating anyone for dealing with the carbon. It's based on figuring out what keeps the economy going while moving the world towards net zero.

(Although we do have such "technology" — for example, the trees that people are planting to get these credits. The credit is paid for an action that demonstrably removes CO2 from the air, and is scaled according to the expected removal and how much would be charged for polluting that much.)

Well... is it really? Just because someone can pump out some kind of product that someone will buy doesn't mean it's actually worth any externalized cost whatsoever.

It's one thing of we're talking food production and housing. Completely different if we're talking McDonald's happy meal toys.

Like, does the same argument apply to noise pollution? Are we alright installing a factory next to the symphony hall so long as the factory "owns" their land?

I think as our technology and understanding of the world grows we ought to change with it.

We do have the technology to remove carbon from the air. It's just not economically feasible. But the rest is true.