What if the voluntary carbon-offset market implodes in fraud?
An offset-fraud blowup collapses voluntary carbon prices and corporate net-zero claims — the direct read is VCM credit prices and compliance-market spillover, not a (negative) grain move. Rhymes with the Jan-2023 Guardian/Verra rainforest-credit scandal that crashed REDD+ credit values and froze corporate buying. The modeled wheat/corn leg is spurious; transmission hits offset-reliant corporates' disclosed liabilities and the integrity premium between voluntary and compliance credits.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A fraud scandal exposes worthless rainforest credits, collapsing the voluntary carbon market and corporate net-zero claims. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.