Carbon credits
Carbon credit farming
Excerpts from The Soil Grab Greenwashing by Agribusiness[1]:
"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.
As Indulgences
<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."[2]
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."[3]
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."
- ↑ https://www.twn.my/title2/susagri/2022/sa979.htm
- ↑ 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