John,
It’s funny you should say that because most greenies feel the same way about carbon offsets. Most environmentalists are really just anti-capitalists, and so they hate the idea that the rich can just buy their way to zero carbon, or that climate change could be solved with money and technology instead of their ‘virtuous’ ‘back-to-nature’ way: the shivering in the dark method.
Another reason many people who want to fight climate change don’t talk about carbon offsets is that if they actually work, then they should be putting their money where their mouths are and buying some. It costs hardly anything to offset a typical lifestyle, a few hundred bucks a year, but it makes a poor signal compared to using reusable coffee cups and grocery bags, and it actually costs money. If reducing carbon was the real priority for those people they’d be pressuring each other to buy carbon credits: instead it’s all about useless, cheap virtue signaling like banning plastic straws.
As to whether credits really work: I think any project involving growing trees is bullshit, but ones that involve developing and implementing technology should be mostly not bullshit, such as funding methane infrastructure capture at pig farms. The legit companies bend over backwards to prove they aren’t bullshit, with extensive third party audits, which you’d expect because there is so much money to be made selling legit ones.