Verra
Founded as Verified Carbon Standard in 2005 by a consortium led by the World Economic Forum. Has since become the largest vendor in the voluntary carbon market.
Greenwashing
Industrial Collusion
Verra is a member of the International Emissions Trading Association, whose membership includes top petroleum corporations such as British Petroeum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Enbridge, Equinor, ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, and Shell Oil. These companies have been knowingly denying climate collapse for decades and are currently engaged in extensive greenwashing campaigns which include the use of Verra's offsets.[1]
Top fossil fuel financiers such as Bank of America & Goldman Sachs, and greenwashing pesticide-monoculture ag companies including Bayer-Monsanto and Cargill also belong to the IETA.[2]
Monoculture Plantations
The project title on the Verra protect database is “‘Guanaré’ forest plantations on degraded grasslands under extensive grazing”. The project consists of more than 21,000 hectares of eucalyptus monocultures. The project was set up by Guanaré AS, a Uruguayan forestry investment firm founded by Peter Lyford Pyke. The industrial forestry operations on the ground are carried out by Agroempresa Forestal, a Uruguayan company. The timber is harvested and shipped to India and China.
Tokenization
In Fall of 2021, the demand for Verra's carbon credits driven by tokenization for the launch of Toucan Protocol and Klima DAO accounted for 25% of all of Verra's sales.
Following a 4/7/22 credit quality vetting performed by Carbon Plan and publicized by Bloomberg News, Verra announced it would prohibit the tokenization of retired credits by Toucan Protocol or other parties.
The following month, Verra announced that it was prohibiting the tokenization of "retired" credits but would create a new category of "immobilized" credits which could be tokenized instead to avoid "mind frying" confusion in the voluntary carbon market.[4] According to Toucan Protocol's blog, this announcement stemmed from a "lengthy dialogue" between the two corporations.[5] Both companies belong to the IETA along with the world's largest fossil fuel corporations and Wall Street banks.
- ↑ https://redd-monitor.org/2022/07/13/how-to-burn-the-planet-shell-invests-us38-million-in-carbonext-brazils-biggest-redd-offset-firm/
- ↑ https://www.ieta.org/Our-Members
- ↑ https://redd-monitor.org/2022/07/18/german-supermarket-aldi-buys-carbon-offsets-from-monoculture-eucalyptus-plantations-in-uruguay-in-order-to-claim-that-its-milk-is-carbon-neutral/
- ↑ https://redd-monitor.org/2022/05/29/verra-prohibits-tokenisation-of-retired-offsets-toucan-welcomes-the-news/
- ↑ https://blog.toucan.earth/response-to-verras-announcement/