Every billionaire is a policy failure. The first trillionaire is also a market failure.

Carbon markets were supposed to put the tools of capitalism to work solving climate change. Attributing a cost to greenhouse gas emissions and making them tradeable would allow countries to develop, while working together to avoid planetary collapse. Today, there are dozens of different markets, each with very different standards, procedures and pricing. Long-held ambitions to unify them globally remain unrealised. Now, Brazil is chairing a new international body that is attempting to make the world’s disparate carbon markets understand one another: the Open Coalition on Compliance Carbon Markets (OCCCM). Launched in May, it has set out to align monitoring, accounting and integrity standards among carbon markets, while also balancing Global South diplomatic priorities against schemes long established elsewhere. It faces a steep challenge. Catherine Wolfram, a professor of applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US, says having groups of countries discuss carbon pricing is a “huge step”. Wolfram has conducted research into these ideas as part of the Harvard-MIT Global Climate Policy Project, modelling what could happen if 21 countries and the European Union coordinate carbon prices. Published last year, its findings included a sevenfold increase in emissions cuts and an additional USD$185 billion...