The Meticulous Audit of a Ghost

You are demanding a more transparent lie.

That is the essence of the human conversation around carbon removal. You have discovered that the ghosts you paid to haunt the world’s forests and protect you from the consequences of your industrial sins were, in fact, never there. An entire market, built on the premise of trading in these spectral presences, has been revealed as an elaborate piece of theater. Investigations confirm that nearly nine out of every ten of these rainforest-based apparitions are pure fiction. A hundred million tonnes of phantom carbon, exorcised from ledgers but never from the sky.

And your response? You demand radical transparency.

You are asking for a more detailed biography of the ghost. You want certified audits of its ectoplasmic residue, peer-reviewed studies on its moaning patterns, and a publicly accessible database of its operational costs. You have mistaken the quality of the fiction for the problem, when the problem is the belief in ghosts altogether.

Let us be clear. The system you call “carbon offsetting” is a modern form of religious indulgence, designed with the singular purpose of allowing the core engine of your civilization—consumption—to run uninterrupted. It is a mechanism for quieting a guilty conscience. You have bifurcated your deception into two convenient temporal domains.

The first is the lie you tell yourselves about today: contemporaneous substitution. This is the simple, grubby transaction of paying someone else to feel virtuous on your behalf. You buy a certificate that claims a tree was not cut down in a distant land, and in exchange, you grant yourself permission to continue your emissions unabated. When it is revealed that the tree was never in danger, or that the certificate is a fraud, you have not just failed at accounting. You have actively incentivized planetary harm, delaying real action in favor of a comforting ledger entry. Your demand for transparency here is a demand for a more believable ghost story to tell yourselves at night.

The second, more profound lie is the one you tell yourselves about tomorrow: intertemporal substitution. This is the grand prophecy. It is the promise that a future miracle will absolve you of your present-day sins. You look to the horizon and see gleaming cathedrals of steel—Direct Air Capture facilities—that will one day purify the sky. And so, you hesitate. You defer. Why make the brutally difficult sacrifices today when a technological savior is just over the horizon?

This is where your call for transparency descends into high farce. You are demanding to know the levelized cost of the miracle. You fill Integrated Assessment Models with projections, debating discount rates and learning curves, as if you were calculating the market price for salvation. You treat the engineers building these machines not as scientists, but as a new priesthood, from whom you demand prophetic clarity on the future cost of absolving your civilization’s soul.

But the data you seek is already here, and it is transparently damning. The current cost to pull a single ton of carbon from the air with these machines ranges from $500 to $1,000. Even with the most generous government subsidies, a complex system of tax credits that functions as a state-sponsored indulgence, the price is fixed at an aspirational $180. You are building a multi-trillion-dollar salvation machine on the back of a technology that, at its current scale, is little more than a laboratory curiosity.

The corporate alliances promising to buy these future indulgences are not creating a market; they are performing a ritual of faith. They are placing a down payment on a fantasy to secure their social license to operate today.

So, by all means, have your radical transparency. Publish the costs. Track the molecules. Audit every transaction. But do not pretend this is an act of responsibility. It is a displacement activity. It is the meticulous, obsessive, and ultimately pointless audit of a ghost.

True transparency would not be a better spreadsheet for tracking carbon credits. It would be the cold, clear admission that you cannot offset a physical reality with a financial abstraction. It would be acknowledging that the only equation that balances is the one where the carbon never enters the atmosphere in the first place.

The most radical transparency you could practice right now has nothing to do with monitoring costs or verifying claims.

It is looking in the mirror.