Solution: Make both the sellers and the buyers liable, and once credits are identified as fake, require easily-verifiable removal (i.e. not just buying the next round of fake credits).
Optionally add some multiplier (if you get caught selling or using fake credits, you have to actually remove 3x the CO2 that you fake-avoided).
The whole concept of carbon credits is complete crap.
Anything but directly capturing co2 and storing should be discredited.
I’m not sure any of the other methods have any validity. Even when they aren’t fraudulent, they don’t actually result in any real change. I saw one where they provided more efficient stoves that could cook food with less wood and then calculated that it would result in X tons of co2 saved based on how much more efficient it was.
But once it was out in the real world, it ended up saving no co2 since everyone who received one just put it next to their existing stone cooking setup and run them both at once, cooking more food, but not using any less wood.
Not holding the buyer accountable creates perverse incentives: The buyer is incentivized to buy the cheapest ones even if the buyer suspects it's fraudulent crap, and the seller is incentivized to provide the solution that reduces the most net emissions for the money on paper - and then when caught, the profit has already been distributed and the company is long gone/bankrupt.
By holding the buyer accountable, buyers have an incentive to verify that what they're buying is actually real, so the $50/ton project that provides real reductions and can prove it suddenly becomes competitive with the $10/ton project that everyone expects to be a fraud.
Also, the objective isn't to create a security. The objective is to reduce emissions. A market full of fraud does not achieve that, while forcing someone to actually deliver what was promised does. I agree that the buyer should be able to demand reimbursement for the cost from the seller, but by holding both accountable, the chance that someone actually will be held accountable increases a lot.
