Commentary The world has been ending for decades. In 1989, a senior official from the U.N. Environment Program warned that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” For good measure a study from the program added that shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s dust bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands. So much for that. In 2006, in his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore stated unequivocally that we only had 10 more years before we reached the point of no return. It would seem that we’ve been barreling down a path of climate-driven self-destruction forever. One solution that’s been put forward has been the idea of carbon offsets or carbon taxes. According to the World Bank, 40 countries and 20 cities around the world use some form of …