One of the few upsides of 15-hour plane rides is that you have time to catch up on reading. I read in a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine that the largest company in the market of carbon offsets was basically collecting money to do almost nothing and wildly exaggerated the environmental benefits of what it was doing, which was basically sitting on forested land on Zimbabwe and pledging not to develop it.
Back in Zurich, South Pole continued enthusiastically promoting Kariba. In the months after learning of the miscalculation, it sold more than three million environmentally worthless credits, to Porsche, Nestlé, and Nando’s, along with others including the Cannes Film Festival and a network of Australian zoos.
But scrutiny of the market was increasing. Investigations by the Guardian, Bloomberg, and others had highlighted questionable accounting and community abuses by carbon projects. Greenpeace and other nonprofits had published reports denouncing the trade as a dangerous distraction from genuine efforts to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
One Friday evening that November, a forest-ecology expert named Elias Ayrey posted a satellite image of the Kariba area online. “I find myself quite upset,” he wrote. “I just reviewed a #carbon project that’s likely receiving more than 30x as many credits as it should.” Ayrey, who works for an independent ratings agency called Renoster, had used NASA satellite imagery to calculate that deforestation in the Kariba reference region was significantly lower than the company had stated. He signed off with a disclaimer: “All opinions are my own. And my own opinion is that everyone involved with this project should be arrested.”
Back in July, here at NR, Max Laraia, a research associate at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and his colleague senior fellow Richard Morrison, laid out how a lot of carbon offset projects amounted to smoke-and-mirrors — big fees from corporate clients, with minimal impact on the environment in the long term.
Last month, Switzerland’s advertising regulator ruled that FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, could no longer call the 2022 World Cup “carbon neutral,” citing a lack of sufficient evidence to support the claim. Delta Air Lines is also facing a class-action lawsuit alleging that the airline’s declaration as “the world’s first carbon-neutral airline” relies on junk science and is demonstrably false. The French food company Danone is also being sued for such allegedly misleading claims.
Most significant are the allegations against Verra. The organization operates the world’s leading greenhouse-gas-crediting program with sales to big companies such as Shell and BHP. An investigation by the Guardian found that more than 90 percent of the company’s rainforest offset credits do not represent genuine carbon reductions. Climate Home News discovered that Chinese rice-cultivation projects listed on the Verra registry used accounting tricks and attempted to take credit for changes in agricultural methods that were already well established.
When you wrap an endeavor in the trappings of a good cause, a lot of people’s skepticism and critical thinking seem to wither away. Very few people wanted to look too hard at how Ibram X. Kendi’s Boston University anti-racism center was spending its money, or where all of that money donated to the Black Lives Matter movement’s national organization went. We can chuckle at the gullible, naïve donors to those progressive causes, but we shouldn’t ignore the fact that conservative activists have ended up buying multimillion-dollar mansions in gated communities, after pledging to help get conservative candidates elected and failing. The Lincoln Project may have been particularly shameless, but they are very far from alone in the art of fleecing donors and lining their own pockets, with little actual effort or results for their alleged mission.
In the case of these big companies paying lucrative fees to effectively buy indulgences for their carbon emissions, we have to wonder if anyone at those companies actually cared whether their offsets existed. They spent money and got good publicity for being “green” and got to call themselves “carbon neutral.” And in the end, that’s all they really needed.