Nitrogen oxide pollution was significantly curtailed using a credit based system. It was reasonable to think that it could have worked well for Carbon Dioxide emissions too but it requires that these emissions and their offsets be easily quantifiable. Much easier to do with nitrogen oxides but not so much with CO2. The fossil fuel industry doesn't even want people to acknowledge that fossil fuels are responsible for global warming at all let alone support a Carbon credit system.

Funny, when the climate change deniers called offsets a scam, everyone dogpiled them. Now that they've been definitively outed as a scam and it is an acceptable narrative among the left, offsets were of course always a scam by the oil industry and politicians.