The Carbon-Offset Game Is Up

A major environmentalist group has found that the carbon offsets beloved by far-left activists are ineffective at best.

Carbon offsetting is the global-warming equivalent of the ancient religious practice of buying indulgences. Carbon offsets offer a financial mechanism to compensate for an entity’s emission of greenhouse gases by paying someone else to reduce or remove their own emissions such as by planting trees, which absorb carbon dioxide. Theoretically, this enables emissions to be canceled out, but in reality carbon offsets are plagued by corruption and ineffectiveness.

Major proponents of carbon offsets include the Bezos Earth Fund and former U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. The United Nations has a carbon-offset platform, while the University of Oxford devotes countless hours of research to tweaking its carbon-offset guidance principles. Carbon offsets, in other words, are increasingly prominent.

But now the United Nations–backed nonprofit Science-Based Targets initiative has found that carbon offsets rarely accomplish anything, according to a secret preliminary draft reviewed by Reuters. It finds that virtually all offsets do not actually remove CO₂ from the atmosphere but merely enhance the bottom line.

The draft states that “higher quality empirical and observational evidence suggests that some or most emission reduction credits are ineffective in delivering emissions reductions.” The draft cites a scientific study concluding that at least one of the projects financially supported by the offsets in the Brazilian Amazon was utterly ineffective. Some schemes are purely corrupt, selling “more carbon credits than the projects can deliver on, or exaggerat[ing] the emission reductions they achieve.”

In one infamous case, the Vatican received carbon-offset certificates claiming millions of trees had been planted in Hungary to absorb carbon . . . except those trees were never planted.

As government efforts to prevent global warming have created numerous failures, with the U.S. Government Accounting Office literally being unable to find any benefits to taxpayers from the tens of billions of dollars spent each year on global warming, environmentalists have increasingly turned toward pressuring the private sector to enact their agenda.

This is devastating news for the market in voluntary carbon dioxide offsets, which are currently used by major companies like Microsoft and Amazon.com for around $2 billion each year.

As carbon offsets have grown more popular, many celebrities, such as Taylor Swift, have begun purchasing offsets to cancel out the emissions from their private jets. Carbon-offset companies now compete for the dollars of the eco-conscious and affluent, with CNaught offering flat-rate pricing per tonne of emissions and “your first tonne for free,” while Terrapass offers carbon-offset bundles for everything from weddings to tourist trips. But it should be unsurprising that the carbon-offset industry is largely a scam.

Environmentalists have known for years that carbon offsets aren’t primarily about stopping global warming but instead mainly a scheme for obtaining money in exchange for dodging the legal and public-relations risks of polluting. Pay up, and the legal and media juggernaut will leave your business alone . . . mostly.

Media investigations by the Guardian into Verra, the world’s largest carbon-offset nonprofit certification system, found that roughly 90 percent of its operations in the Brazilian Amazon did not represent actual reductions of carbon emissions but existed only on paper. Verra approves roughly three-quarters of voluntary carbon offsets, meaning the organization can claim it avoided emissions by not deforesting.

“For example, if an organisation estimates its project will stop 100 hectares [247 acres] of deforestation, it can use a Verra-approved formula to convert that into 40,000 CO₂e [carbon dioxide equivalent] of saved carbon emissions in a dense tropical forest if no deforestation takes place, although the formula varies according to habitat and other factors,” writes the Guardian. “Those saved emissions can then be bought by a company and applied to its own carbon reduction targets.”

Carbon offsets have been heavily criticized by scientists, with a column in the scientific journal Nature claiming “offsetting is worse than doing nothing” as it “almost certainly contributes to a net increase in the absolute rate of global emissions growth.” Such academics often want government to take a much heavier hand to reduce emissions through intrusive regulation. The Washington Post admitted that “there’s growing scientific consensus that the vast majority of carbon offset programs are unlikely to achieve any level of the emission reductions they promise.” So blatant are the problems with carbon offsets that some far-left activists have even caught on, with the extremist environmental organization Greenpeace agreeing that “carbon offsetting is truly a scammer’s dream scheme,” in an example of a stopped clock being right twice a day.

Only now, after eco-mania has pressured major corporations into buying billions in offsets in what is essentially a shakedown, the rug has been pulled out from under them . . . with the only winner being rich and well-connected environmentalists who profit from the carbon-offset-industry racket.

Former Democratic vice president Al Gore and David Blood, the former chief of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, made nearly $218 million in profits from a carbon-trading company, Generation Investment Management, which they co-founded. The company was sketchy to say the least, essentially monetizing potential new regulations from the Obama administration’s proposed “social costs of carbon.”

Carbon offsets may help a few elite politicians become even richer, but more people across the political spectrum are noticing that the carbon-offset industry’s much-touted benefits are a lot of hot air.