I don't think it is hypocritical for a landowner to receive credit for not logging just because they weren't planning on doing so to begin with. Why shouldn't someone who has cared for land for decades not get the same credit as someone who has just now decided to stop doing further harm? Members of the Audubon society may question whether enabling companies to generate more CO2 pollution is consistent with their values though.
The bigger problem is that allowing such broad and varied credits completely undermines the purpose of cap and trade. If you limit cap and trade to a small well defined set of industries (car manufacturers, electric generating stations, etc), then you can easily measure what the current emissions are and decide on an acceptable level of emissions (the cap), and then allow the market do decide how to allocate that pollution to meet that goal. There are legitimate reasons for different cars to have different fuel efficiencies, and good reasons to keep old plants running until their end of life. Nor is there any good reason why each company needs to have a broad enough portfolio of products to meet those goals individually (McLauren should not have to make enough compliance cars to offset their emissions if Tesla is willing to do it for them).
But once you start allowing anything and everything that could increase or decrease emissions into the pool, then it is impossible to measure what the base level of effective emissions are, and thus impossible to set a meaningful cap. It was a stupid idea when the EU did it, and it was even stupider for California to allow them after they had already seen the problem that EU had with carbon credits. They really need to revamp the entire program if they want to get serious about meeting carbon goals.