Yes, this is grift. I have often thought that major changes like the ones you describe follow an arc not unlike Elizabeth Kubler Ross's five stages of grief which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The big difference is in the middle stage. If you sub grift for bargaining you're home. Lite cigarettes and carbon offsets are grift/bargaining and that's actually a positive, if not a good sign, because it puts on one track. It's also good because we are already seeing signs of acceptance in things like EVs (regardless of what you might think of them), wind and solar farms. I wrote a book about some of this a few years ago, it didn't sell. But my point is that this is progress. It will take about a century in my calculation for the planet to revert to something truly sustainable and in that time experts expect to see earth's population rise to about 10 billion (earth's carrying capacity BTW) down to something much more sustainable like 5 billion. Reconfiguring cities before then doesn't make a lot of sense especially if you believe, as I do, that we are in an emergency right now. The need is to keep things from getting worse. Lastly watch out for the biggest grift of all carbon capture and storage of CO2 underground. It won't work for reasons of physics and chemistry but open ocean iron fertilization will work. I've written about all of the elsewhere on this site.