I am no specialist, but carbon credits seem like they can work to me. The problem is they need to be very carefully analyzed. Here in Brazil there have been cases of people illegally seizing protected forests (far off in Amazon regions) and making huge amounts of money selling off carbon credits simply for 'not taking the forest down' (it could be even worse: taking down the forest for even more 'reforestation credits'). Usually most of those 'pay someone not to pollute' can be very problematic, because in principle anyone can declare (misleading) intent to pollute any amount and thus could get infinite credits.

So this kind of scenario has to be carefully taken into account in favor of scenarios which lead to actual emission reductions. It's not a simple fungible asset or commodity as some (naively) assume.