Doctorow has a spiel (https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/23/drop-a-dime/) in the middle of a discussion where he talks about carbon credits, and points to a website that compares them to theoretical murder credits:

The answer to too many carbon emissions is to democratically decide to ban certain kinds of carbon emissions. But that would require states to do things, rather than simply "nudging" a process that is guided by "the market." So we end up with these junk "credits" that companies manufacture by promising not to log forests, many of which are already wildlife preserves and/or subsequently burn down:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/31/carbon-upsets/#big-tradeoff

The best critique of this whole thing came in 2021 from the Climate Ad Project, who produced a short video in which people were allowed to kill one another provided they purchased "murder offsets":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

In a state of nature, murder exists. We, as a society, have decided this is bad. Rather than creating "incentives" not to murder, we just banned murder. Admittedly, we still get some murders, but when these happen, we don't treat it as "a mispricing of the anti-murder incentive" – we treat it as a crime.

Except, for many, crime and punishment == appropriate pricing of actions. So unless the cost is high enough, the action is do-able (gangland murders, for example, or corporate pollution). “Crime” => morally sanctioned by the society you’re in, and unless the ethical and moral aspect is part of the analysis crime devolves into market incentives, no?