Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow and next week, back on Aug. 21. Enjoy a week of low volatility. Unless you are Elon Musk, in which case, enjoy whatever crazy stuff you’re going to get up to.
If you have a bunch of trees, and you chop them down to make paper or lumber or whatever, you can sell the paper or lumber or whatever for money, but on the other hand trees store carbon and cutting them down is bad for climate change. If instead you do not chop down the trees, that is good for the environment, and it is a great innovation of modern finance that, now, you can get paid for not chopping down the trees. This is called “carbon credits.” There are measurement problems.