When the world’s wealthiest people meet in exotic locations to promote drastic government action to cut carbon emissions, they face the public relations challenge of justifying the private jets they flew to the conference where they then call on lesser mortals back home to save the planet by limiting their own travels.
What they use to circumvent charges of hypocrisy is something called the voluntary carbon credit market.
When President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy John Kerry jets around the Earth venting 320 tons of carbon (equal to 20 years worth of emissions by the average American), he offsets this by paying other people to emit less. Such reduction projects might include the preservation of forests that would have otherwise been cut down, the planting of trees in urban areas, or the construction of wind turbines to offset decommissioned coal plants.
The theory is that without the money spent on carbon credits by Kerry and his ilk, forests would not have been saved, trees would not have been planted, or wind turbines would not have been built.
But several studies have repeatedly proven that most if not all carbon credits are frauds, usually because the carbon-friendly project was already set to be completed without money from the carbon credit mechanism. The forest in question, for example, was already protected by other means, the urban tree planting was already funded, and the new wind turbines were already going to be built.
The carbon credits that Kerry and others buy are essentially worthless as means of saving the planet. Their value is only in allowing Kerry to save face. Kerry does not pay for them, of course, you do.
Almost every global corporation does what Kerry does. Boeing, Chevron, and even Nestle buy credits to help market individual brands such as Kit Kat bars. That is all carbon credits really are: worthless marketing ploys designed to assuage the guilt of climate change fanatics about their own personal consumption, which their ideology insists is contributing to climate apocalypse.
If it were only that rich people were buying worthless pieces of paper to maintain their social status, and global corporations were selling a few extra candy bars by claiming they were good for the environment, that would be fine. Let rich people waste their money if that is what they want to do. But it is not fine that government is involved.
Biden is giving credence to the fraud by issuing a Voluntary Carbon Markets Joint Policy Statement signed by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, and climate policy adviser John Podesta. The 10 “Principles for Responsible Participation in Voluntary Carbon Markets” are not legally binding, but they perpetuate the fiction that carbon credit markets create real value. The document is full of calls for “validation and verification” and market “integrity,” but any attempt to commodify carbon emissions is doomed to failure.
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Carbon credit markets would be the only market in the world where an invisible commodity was being bought and sold without any accurate method to measure how much was being bought and sold, where that same commodity is functionally useless to both buyer and seller, and where both the buyer and seller are incentivized to exaggerate the quantity traded.
Carbon credit markets are inherently fraudulent, and Biden aids and abets this fraud by proposing principles for its regulation.