What a surprise – I’ve written about this for quite some time. Many of the carbon offset scams sell “credits” to protect forests that no one was ever going to cut down (for other reasons), and sometimes sell the same plot of forest “credits” to multiple buyers. In Oregon, hundreds of thousands of forest acres protected as “carbon offsets” burned up in recent wildfires, releasing most of their carbon into the atmosphere. Similar issues in California.
Carbon trading company South Pole is the world’s largest such firm, and is now being accused of scams.
“When a highly-marketed and well-known project is revealed not to be delivering the claimed impacts, there’s a risk the entire reputation of carbon markets will be destroyed,” said Allister Furey, head of Sylvera, a London-based firm that rates the quality of carbon projects and which gave poor marks to Kariba
If you squandered money on Delta or other airline “carbon offset credits” you bought into this scam and are a victim.
The entire concept of carbon offsets is a giant scam. Someone pays a 3rd party to protect trees that were not being cut down, so they can then burn a boat load of oil.
The companies generated — and sold — credits for saving trees that, it turns out, weren’t under threat.
Or to pay someone to plant trees that they were going to plant anyway:
But the teak plantation seems to fail the “additionality” test: It would have existed with or without carbon payments. Santa Genoveva’s production director Victor Fernandez told Bloomberg Green that carbon offsets didn’t alter the company’s business plan or encourage it to plant more trees. “We’ve kept the very same plan we’ve had since the beginning,” he said in an interview. “It’s simply an extra benefit.”
Carbon Offset Seller’s Forest-Protection Projects Questioned – Bloomberg
What does it tell you about climate change when the largest seller of climate offsets is accused of running a scam? A visit to the CEO’s LinkedIn page shows posts telling us that we are all, basically, going to die really soon – fear being a powerful motivator to do stupid things, apparently.
