The cost of carbon offsets is apparently less than a penny per kWh. This is barely anything in comparison to the price of the electricity itself, so it doesn't matter whether people are in actuality paying the true cost; they might as well be. Such a world would look almost identical to our own.
I couldn't believe this, so I checked around a bit.
According to [1], the cost for offsets are $5.50 to $29 per ton of CO2. According to [2], 1 kWh produces 2.08-2.18 lbs kg of CO2 when burning coal (0.94-0.99 kg). Thus, the cost for the offset is about 0.52-2.9 US cents/kWh, or when using different power sources[3], 0.32-1.7 US cents/kWh, hence your number is about right.
Now I guess the next thing to check is how solid those offset efforts really are. Also, probably they are cheap because they are the low-hanging fruits, I suspect that if everyone would offset their usage, the offset costs per kWh would become much higher. Thus, your assertion that the world would look almost identical if everyone would pay the true cost may well still be wrong.
