Carbon credits
Latest comprehensive analysis of the carbon credit market writ large found that the majority of offset projects that have sold the most carbon credits are ‘likely junk’.[1]
Carbon Accounting
"Carbon accounting is an uneven technical and political process that makes multiples forms of carbon legible on financial markets but does little to physically address atmospheric carbon concentrations"
"Processes framed as technical are often spaces where uneven social and political interests are manipulated or obscured"
Questionable, wonky, and often blatantly dishonest carbon accounting is rampant. Indeed, a 2016 study by the European Commission found that 85% of the offset projects used by the EU under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), one of the largest carbon offset markets, failed to reduce emissions at all (Cames et al. 2016).[2]
The Greenhouse Gas Protocol
As described on its website, the GHG Protocol "supplies the world's most widely used greenhouse gas accounting standards," and "More than 9 out of 10 Fortune 500 companies reporting to CDP use GHG Protocol."
This standard
, is a product of the World Resources Institute, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, corporate partners like BP and General Motors, environmental groups such as the World Wildlife Fund, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, The Energy Research Institute, and energy industry partners like Norsk Hydro, Tokyo Electric, and Shell which “identified an action agenda to address climate change that included the need for standardized measurement of GHG emissions”[3]
Industries
Oil & Gas
Oil companies such as Shell Oil have played a leading role in development carbon credit methodologies and investing in the voluntary carbon market, notably through its partnership with Verra and membership in the IETA.
Shell Oil is also the world's largest purchaser of carbon credits.
Automotive
Lithium car manufacturer Tesla has been deriving increasing revenue from selling carbon credits, reaching a record $1.78 billion in 2022.[4]
For years, the names of other carmakers paying Tesla for its carbon credits was a secret.[5]
In 2019, Bloomberg disclosed that General Motors and Fiat Chrysler were two of the companies operating as Tesla's "secret source of cash."[6]
Agribusiness
Excerpts from The Soil Grab Greenwashing by Agribusiness[7]:
"The corporate interest in carbon farming extends beyond simply greenwashing industrial agriculture or offsetting emissions. It provides a powerful incentive to draw farmers into the digital platforms that agribusiness corporations and big tech companies are jointly developing to influence farmers on their choice of inputs and farming practices."
"And then, there is the issue of the greenhouse gases these carbon credit farming programmes generate. Nearly all the programmes focus narrowly on quantifying carbon sequestered in the soil and do not consider the overall emissions that industrial farming produces. They do not factor in the amount of chemical inputs a farm applies or the amount of fossil fuels burnt running tractors and other machinery, or the increased emissions that can result from the first years of transition to no-till.[16]They do not account for the emissions produced by their remote verification systems either– from the energy needed to store the data these systems generate to the aeroplanes or satellites they use to monitor farms. And they are based on tweaks to a model of industrial agriculture that depends heavily on chemical inputs and that supplies a hugely wasteful and polluting corporate food system.[17]"
The article addresses Cargill and Microsoft explicitly and references other corporate players in citations.
Airlines
Delta Airlines
In February of 2020 Delta Air Lines pledged to become carbon neutral through the purchasing of carbon credits.[8] Delta committed to spending 1 billion dollars, over a ten year period, on the carbon offset credits. A recent lawsuit, filed in May of 2023, against Delta claims that their carbon offset plan is false advertising, because carbon credits do nothing to quell the climate crisis; The lawsuit was filed in California by the law firm, Haderlein and Kouyoumdjian LLP [9] Krikor Kouyoumdjian, in a statement regarding the lawsuit, said
When companies say: ‘Don’t worry about our emissions, they’re sorted,’ they are communicating complacency. They are letting consumers pay to feel better and not have to worry about the impact of their consumption. But that is counterfactual to reality. It is not something that you can pay away.
When I hear ‘carbon neutral’, I think you’re not doing anything wrong, you’re not hurting the environment in any way. It’s like you don’t exist. That’s what the words mean to any rational person: that we can participate in your business without any guilt. Most of us who care about the environment walk around with this giant cloud of guilt that our very existence hurts the environment in a bunch of ways.[10]
Avoided Emissions
If Everyone Did It, Would It Still Work?
“Preserving an acre of rainforest” fails the test. Suppose all of the world’s cement plant operators agreed to offset their emissions this way. Suppose that this succeeds so well that 100% of the world’s remaining rainforests are protected forever. We’re still nowhere near net zero! We don’t need to analyze “additionality” or “leakage” to figure that out. We can just note that cement plants are putting gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere, and no one is pulling CO2 back out.
“Avoided Emissions” Are a Shell Game Avoided emissions fail the “if everyone did it” test, because this type of “offset” does not actually remove any carbon from the atmosphere. At best, this approach can sometimes provide funding for urgent needs, such as protecting irreplaceable virgin rainforest. But in general, it is a not a true offset, it’s just a way of bribing someone else to reduce their harmful activities as a smoke screen for the fact that you are continuing yours. We need to stop razing the Amazon and close the coal plants.[11]
Indulgence Theory
<https://e360.yale.edu/features/carbon_offsets_the_indispensable_indulgence>
<https://cooleypubco.com/2022/06/27/carbon-offset-medieval-indulgence/>
"The German environmental research institute Öko-Institut investigated the effectiveness of existing offsetting projects for the European Commission and concluded that only 2% of the offset projects have a high probability of resulting in additional emissions reduction." <https://stay-grounded.org/emissions-offsetting-a-modern-sale-of-indulgences/>
<https://rivervalley.co.nz/what-has-a-papal-indulgence-and-carbon-offsetting-got-in-common/>
Carbon Colonialism
Carbon Colonialism has been defined as "the practice of claiming space in the Global South to meet the needs of the Global North in the name of carbon dioxide reduction."[12]
An early study (2004) to use the phrase: <Bachram H (2004) Climate fraud and carbon colonialism: the new trade in greenhouse gases. Capital Nat Social 15(4):5–20>
Additional sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0743016714000692
The UK
"Rather than the substantial reductions claimed by the UK government, therefore, the last two decades have seen a concerted shifting of emissions away from the domestic to the imported, as the UK effectively outsources its carbon intensive industry to the global South."[13]
Australia
Preview for the 46 minute documentary report (Feb '23), Carbon Colonialism:
"In the race to curb catastrophic climate change, prominent Australian businesses have been enthusiastic customers of carbon credits. They've been offsetting their emissions by buying credits from companies promising to stop exploitative timber harvesting, whilst lifting locals out of poverty.
But reporter Stephen Long has found that there is a vast chasm between what is marketed and what is really happening on the ground.
In a month-long trip, the team travelled to some of the most isolated villages in Papua New Guinea. They uncovered environmental devastation in the very areas one company claimed to be protecting and indigenous landowners angry at unfulfilled promises."
Norway
20 page report discussing the case of Green Resources and its carbon violence profoundly disrupting the lives of ~8,000 people in Uganda: <https://eprints.qut.edu.au/79446/1/Lyons_-_Darker_Side_of_Green.pdf>
Hydropower
https://archive.internationalrivers.org/sites/default/files/attached-files/failed_mechanism_3.pdf
Sources
Pyrolize
<https://climatenewsaustralia.com/the-vast-majority-of-carbon-offsets-do-not-help-to-combat-climate-change-ext-visuals/> <https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/>
Cited
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/19/do-carbon-credit-reduce-emissions-greenhouse-gases
- ↑ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02653-1
- ↑ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-020-02653-1
- ↑ https://carboncredits.com/tesla-carbon-credit-sales-reach-record-1-78-billion-in-2022/
- ↑ https://carboncredits.com/tesla-regulatory-carbon-credit-sales-jumps-116/
- ↑ https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-03/tesla-s-secret-source-of-cash-unmasked-as-gm-and-fiat-chrysler?sref=9LYdrt30
- ↑ https://www.twn.my/title2/susagri/2022/sa979.htm
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/feb/14/delta-carbon-neutral-airline-plan
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/30/delta-air-lines-lawsuit-carbon-neutrality-aoe
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/30/delta-air-lines-lawsuit-carbon-neutrality-aoe
- ↑ https://climateer.substack.com/p/avoided-emissions
- ↑ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337622634_Carbon_Colonialism_A_postcolonial_assessment_of_carbon_offsetting
- ↑ https://decolonisegeography.com/blog/2021/11/carbon-colonialism/
- ↑ https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-13/carbon-colonialism/101968870