🔟Non-technical challenges

Even a perfectly designed, cost-effective high quality carbon credit market on a frictionless market and infinitely fast and scalable blockchain with audited smart contracts would have problems to overcome. These essentially fall into three categories:

1. Opposition to market-based mechanisms. Problems of free markets: speculation, volatility, greed, fear, fraud and FOMO.

2. Opposition to offsetting as opposed to cutting emissions.

3. One-size fits all does not fit all.

Our thoughts on this: Carbon offsets and their tokenized counterparts could be replaced by well-calibrated taxation of the national or supranational level. It would also be possible for lawmakers to force decarbonization through stricter production requirements and a shrinking baseline for industry - forcing carbon reductions instead of allowing polluters to “buy their way out of the problem”. But how realistic is this? When was the last time politicians and business leaders have reacted wisely and in a timely manner? While offsets are not ideal, ambitious offsets and consumer pressure have the potential to force action and create a solution from the ground up that will be hard for governments and industry to ignore.