The stock market is down, the credit market is frozen, the real estate market is tanking … the end is near! Despite all these bad economic signs, one market, according to The Washington Post, is actually doing quite well: the carbon offset market.

Never mind that just about every neutral study done on on the carbon offset market has revealed it to be an absolute fraud. The wealthy secular left demand to keep both their jet setting lifestyles and the belief that unchecked carbon emissions are about to destroy the planet. The result: guilt. The Washington Post reports:

“I was feeling really guilty because I was basically traveling to three continents in the last month: ‘I’ve spent basically six days on an airplane. I’ve got to fix this,’ ” said Michael Sheets, 27, who lives in the District’s Logan Circle neighborhood.
So a few days ago, Sheets paid $240 to a Silver Spring-based vendor, Carbonfund.org, choosing its offsets because they were more than $100 cheaper than a comparable package from another offset seller. He got back an e-mail saying that the 52,920 pounds of greenhouse-gas emissions attributable to him for the entire year, including his trips to Trinidad, Thailand and Argentina, had been canceled out.
“I feel much better about it,” said Sheets, human resources director for an online-education company in Northern Virginia. “I don’t feel as guilty about flying to Vegas tomorrow for the weekend.”

See the progress we’ve made in the past 500 years? In Martin Luther’s time, believers paid the church for sins that would be committed in Vegas. Now the gaia worshiping left pays for the sin of getting to Vegas.

One never has to dig far to uncover the complete fraud behind these offset programs. The Post reports:

In the western Virginia town of Christiansburg, the operators of a landfill sell carbon offsets tied to a project that captures methane, a powerful greenhouse pollutant, and burn it in a tall orange flare. They’ve made $43,000 on the Chicago Climate Exchange in just a couple of months.

But that project was put in long before the offsets were sold and for a different reason: to keep dangerous gases from accumulating in a capped landfill. So if the offset market dried up completely?

Nothing would change.

The money “is gravy to us right now,” said Alan Cummins, executive director of the regional authority that runs the landfill. Even without it, he said, “we would always continue to flare.”