In this paper, we analyze private conservation finance. Historically, conservation, like other public goods, is funded through taxpayers or philanthropies. However, since 1970s there is a growing sense that states are unable to address climate and biodiversity problems. A need arises for private sector to mitigate its own impacts on the environment through policies like offsetting. Offsetting refers to mechanisms in which ecologically destructive developments mitigate their impacts by financing conservation elsewhere. With private developers willing to pay for conservation, a market for supplying conservation emerges. For this market to work while being ecologically coherent, a trade-off must be struck between economic opportunity and ecological controls. This trade-off is configured through a complex assemblage of private and public actors - bureaucrats, NGOs, private equity firms, environmental consultants, and scientists, as well as non-human actors - quantification tools, performance metrics, interest rates, and maps. We analyze these trade-offs to show that odds are stacked against scaling up conservation finance. First, interviews with national and international conservation investors reveals how investments are narrowly scoped. Only certain species and habitats align with the parameters of conservation financing while others are ignored. Second, a state-level case-study in Oklahoma shows how offsetting may tie conservation to the trajectories of industry. While a cottage industry for conservation finance may emerge, this industry is structurally dependent on the “demand-side” industry, and largely powerless to shift political economic structures in its favor. We conclude that some private capital may spill into conservation, but any snowball effect depends on the relative muscle of this emergent conservation finance cottage industry to established industrial interests.