You can sell the trees you don’t cut

Matt Levine quotes the Wall Street Journal:

Companies eager to offset their emissions are paying Southern timberland owners not to cut more than a million acres of mill-bound pine trees until next year.

The idea is that the longer the timber stands, the more carbon the trees can sponge from the atmosphere before becoming two-by-fours and telephone poles.

The companies are credited with socking away carbon in wood, measured in metric tons and documented with tradable assets called carbon offsets. Companies buy offsets to scrub emissions from the carbon ledgers they keep to show investors and customers their pollution-reduction efforts. Landowners get a check as long as their trees remain standing.

He talks a bit about the Coase theorem, and on another subject, here is some amusing commentary on Schelling points:

One aspect of hyper-modern finance is that the good numbers are 420 and 69, and if you can price or size something at 420 or 69 (or some legible multiple of 420 or 69) then you will get attention and possibly buyers. Yesterday people wanted the $690 Tesla calls, not the $700 or $600 or $500 calls. There is a conventional behavioral-finance view that trading clusters at round numbers, but the modern version is that trading clusters at Internet Joke Numbers. If you are launching a $400 million special purpose acquisition company, why not launch a $420.69 million SPAC instead? The ticker “NICE” is taken, unfortunately, but still; you will get lots of retail attention and sell more stock and have more aftermarket support if you signal that you are in on the joke.

Also, someone who bought Dogecoin as a memorial to his dog.

That’s quite the mix of academic theory, low-brow humor, and pathos there.