Isn’t all carbon offset just buying carbon credits from the 3rd World?
No, in europe we have an actual cost on CO2-certificates that are issued by the european union. You get a certain amount for free and have to buy the rest for your production. This is only for certrain sectors (steel, cement, brick, plastic, chemicals, etc.etc.etc.).
If you produce more of whatever it is you do you have to buy more. If you change your energy to something with less CO2 or just use your energy more efficiently you use up less of your CO2-certificates and can store them for a rainy day or sell them on the free market exchange.
There is a clear path on reducing the newly issued certificates for the next couple of years until there are no more certificates by 2032. No idea what happens when everyone uses up all of their certificates and we have no more for our industrial production.
The goal is to get everyone to invest in new technologies or produce more efficiently because the alterantive of just doing what you allways did gets more expensive every year by the shortage of certificates and thus rising prices of certificates. The price of the certificates is set by supply and demand on a free trading plattform. This year we have been as high as 89 €/to of CO2 and right now we are at about 65 €/to of CO2 because the expectation is that we are going to produce less in the coming months and therefore use up less of the certificates
This is a purely european thing and our certificates can’t be used anywhere else. Other continents/countries have similar systems, but they are way less restrictive so that they are way less expensive (2 $/to in some asian countries for example) and they don’t enforce it really, but just use it for trading purposes with europe (i.e. “we are green as well”).
In summary it is the attempt to get the heavy industry to be carbon neutral by 2032 or make it so expensive that the heavy industry will leave the continent so that CO2 emmissions will become someone elses problem and us europeans can point with our finger on them and lecture them on beeing green and not using up any ressources. The rest of the world will just have to try to also not consume anything just as we europeans live off of air and love and some grass. The good thing will be that without heavy industry everyone will have a lot of free time.
/EDIT: on the post before that I wrote about a cost of 30 €/kg of CO2. This was wrong. I meant to write 30 €/to of CO2.
That sounds almost entirely artificial 
And I like the last bit. How true!
