Carbon markets are trading systems for emissions permits and offset credits, converting pollution into a financial instrument that allows structural emissions to continue.
Carbon markets extend the logic of carbon credits into a full trading system. Permits to emit are allocated or auctioned, then traded between participants. Companies that reduce emissions below their allowance can sell surplus permits to those who exceed theirs. The system creates a financial incentive to reduce emissions while allowing the total level of pollution to continue.
The mechanism financialises environmental crisis. Pollution becomes a cost to be managed rather than a harm to be prevented. The atmosphere becomes a ledger where debits and credits determine the permissible level of destruction. The market determines the price of pollution, and that price reflects the power of polluters to influence it, not the actual cost to the climate or to communities bearing the effects.
Carbon markets exemplify the broader pattern of market-based solutions to market-produced crises. The system that creates the environmental crisis sells the mechanism for managing it. The polluter profits from both the pollution and the response to it, while the structural drivers of emissions remain intact.