Voluntary standards don't work

I saw an article today about how a voluntary carbon emissions reduction market has produced little effect.

Lots of times politicians will propose voluntary standards by an industry to solve a problem. They will say this is preferable than government intervention in order to not interfere with the market.

This is silly. Most likely, the politicians know this, and are just trying to avoid doing anything about the problem or want to help their friends in industry. But, we can't rule out that they're merely idiots.

In either case, (one of) the reason(s) that it's silly is because the very nature of market competition means than voluntary action by corporations to do something that cuts profits puts them at a competitive disadvantage. You can't afford to be nice if it puts you out of business.

Some amount of this sort of thing will always get done because some firms have market power which lets them take small hits in profitability in order to gain a better reputation (this is especially true of large corporations). Or smaller businesses will often do things not directly profitable in order to build there reputation in the community and hopefully increase sales (with the side benefit of feeling nice about it).

But these effects will almost always be very small. The bottom line is, after all, the bottom line. Hence the failure of the voluntary carbon market.

If you want corporations to do something, then make them do it, so that they all play by the same rules. You can't expect them to do the right thing if doing so will put them out of business.