I think a REC is more like offsetting your Starbucks by paying someone else in line to skip coffee that day.
I can agree REC's could be abused. Although this part: gap between the actual cost of removing carbon from the air I think reflects the immature science of removing carbon from the air, more than anything else. Renewable energy is fifty or seventy years along its development, carbon capture is pretty young, maybe a decade?
If my household budget followed this reasoning, I could offset my Starbucks today by avoiding purchasing one tomorrow.
Every stage in the REC calculation - "solar panels they wouldn't have purchased otherwise", "emissions that would have happened without the solar panels", etc - are ripe for very profitable and fictional adjustments.
The gap between the actual cost of removing carbon from the air, and the cost of an REC, gives a hint as to the difference in how meaningful they are.