CEO of Biggest Carbon Credit Certifier To Resign After Claims Offsets Worthless...
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CEO of Biggest Carbon Credit Certifier To Resign After Claims Offsets Worthless
The head of the world's leading carbon credit certifier has announced he will step down as CEO next month. From a report: It comes amid concerns that Verra, a Washington-based nonprofit, approved tens of millions of worthless offsets that are used by major companies for climate and biodiversity commitments, according to a joint Guardian investigation earlier this year. In a statement on LinkedIn on Monday, Verra's CEO, David Antonioli, said he would leave his role after 15 years leading the organisation that dominates the $2bn voluntary carbon market, which has certified more than 1bn credits through its verified carbon standard (VCS). Antonioli thanked current and former staff, and said he was immensely proud of what Verra had accomplished through the environmental standards it operates. He did not give a reason for his departure and said he would be taking a break once he left the role. Judith Simon, Verra's recently appointed president, will serve as interim CEO following Antonioli's departure on 16 June. "The trust you placed in Verra and myself in my role as CEO has meant a lot, and I leave knowing we have made tremendous strides together in addressing some of the world's most vexing environmental and social problems. Working with you on these important issues has been a great highlight of my career," he said.
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That's great, if the offsets are real. How do you know their offsets have any more value than the ones incorrectly certified by Verra?
How does this "carbon offset" purchase thing actually work and how does it actually benefit "climate change"?
I see companies pay money.....and get credits.
What does this money do to fix the climate problems exactly?
Let's say Exxon pays $1B.
And they get to go on about their business with no one complaining.
How does that $1B help fix the pollution exactly?
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It's an Indulgence, in the catholic sense: you pay money to be absolved of your sins. The reality behind it is irrelevant.
Carbon offset credits are a green-washing scam which appeared around the same time that "net zero" became a thing. it basically is the financiarization of an accounting trick.-
You're flat-out wrong. The Guardian "expose" has done so much climate harm in perpetuating this myth.
Here is how the billions went to fight global change - they used it to purchase acres of the Amazon rainforest that were threatened by development.
However, the Guardian investigators came along and proved that, "ha ha! Those specific acres probably wouldn't have been developed quite yet anyways!!" And the message came across as an allegation of fraud. That's not what happened, and there is every reason
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should have just declared those parts of the Amazon off limits to deforestation anyway.
The concept of "pay me a lot or I will trash the planet" makes me sick to my stomach. Capitalism gone mad.
Carbon offsets, if anything, should only be for positive carbon sequestration such as new afforestation, switching to soil-retaining agriculture, or positive development/deployment, not already funded, of zero-emission energy systems.-
Well, the net result of this is the luxury brands that were purchasing undeveloped lands for preservation, and received ridicule for "greenwashing" as thanks, will no longer do so. I hope the "debunkers" are happy with themselves.
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Hah, a responsible and non corrupt right-wing government in South America?
How long should I hold my breath?
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that is not fighting climate change, that's paying to partially escape the consequences of our current actions. (past actions being already done, and not being remedied)
It allow the business as usual to go on, while not reducing emissions.
I maintain Net zero is a scam accounting trick, and carbon offset credits a way of perpetuating that scam. Yes, the fact that the land is blocked against development* is good, but it is being blocked against current emissions which should not be generated in the first plac
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Indulgence is just a fancy name for a bribe or payment to obtain some unontainable item-service-blessing while making you feel good about it.
A hooker might be cheeper and make you feel just as good.
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In theory, the money is spent on causes that cleanup the environment (plant trees, develop low-carbon alternatives to common products or practices, etc). Exxon pays for their indulgence and gets to pretend to be a good guy, while the money goes to somebody who might help (offset) the damage done. The facilitator (Verra in this case) gets to skim a percentage of it for their operating costs and to pay for their awareness campaigns (marketing).
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If they're paying a billion freaking dollars for cleanup and carbon removal efforts, they ARE good guys, or at least neutral guys!
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If they're paying a billion freaking dollars for cleanup and carbon removal efforts, they ARE good guys, or at least neutral guys!
So, is there some sort of independent verification source that goes out and verifies and document what $$'s go to what mitigation efforts and sources?
Is all the money accounted for in an easily verifiable way?
If not, this just sounds like movements of money to different companies without any real mitigation being done...?
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Not if they're still doing $10B in damage, and only paying $1B.
Also, in this case, it sounds like the companies using this certifier were taken as chumps.
IE I pay somebody to recycle my plastic, only to find out that they "recycled" it straight into the local dump. Or worse, shipped it to Africa or such, burning incredibly dirty bunker oil, to be dumped into the ocean around there.
That said, carbon capture is a very complicated affair, and you can get everything from straight up sequestration to straight u
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They're paying a billion dollars for a weaver to be allowed continue doing what they're doing (i.e., polluting).
My grandparents own a chunk of land in the countryside with some trees on it. It's been sitting like that for decades, and will continue to do so. But, if I say that I will chop them down unless Exxon pays me $1B, they can continue polluting and I get tons of money for literally not doing anything.
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This is an explanation I can get behind. Chiefly because it opens the door for the world to verbally class-up the billions of dollars in extortion/aid payments to places like South Korea, Iran, and Pakistan, by calling them something more feel-good like WMD Offset Credits! How empathetic and humanitarian for the government of SK to allow the USA to generously purchase WMD Offset Credits from the Kim family.
(...until roughly 2029 when WaPo will publish a searing exposé on so called glowing-neon-greenwas
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$1 billion wouldn’t even make a dent in Exxon’s bottom line.
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That is the really sad part about these stupid cap-and-trade, credits systems etc.
A given company like XOM could invest a billion dollars in actually 'greening up their own business' trying technologies to improve efficiencies, developing capture and storage solutions, etc and do the planet a whole lot a good.
However if they do and it does not work, or does produce the results as measured by whatever climate regulator's favored account scheme is - they'd get no reward no tax credit, etc for their effort.
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How does that $1B help fix the pollution exactly?
In short, it doesn't. The concept of carbon credits was founded on the principal that, so long as someone, somewhere, wasn't doing $the_bad_thing, it's perfectly fine if other someones, sowhere, went ahead and did $the_bad_thing as much as they wanted, but that they paid for the privilege. The idea was that if we made it seem expensive to pour carbon into the atmosphere, maybe businesses would curtail pouring carbon into the atmosphere. At least, that's how it was sold. What actually happened was the big oil companies, auto-producers, and other big sponsors of the $the_bad_thing pay a pittance as a nominal "fee" toward carbon offsets, usually going to some company that supposedly prevents development in forested or other backwater type country, most of which was never, ever going to be developed anyway, and then they just keep right on keeping on doing that there $the_bad_thing as much as they want, so long as they pay that little fee to the company that owns the undevelopable land.
It's a nice way to make a middle-man profit on nothing, and gives greenies a boner over nothing, and does exactly zero to actually help slow pollution.
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The problem is that the penalty for the bad action isn't sufficiently significant to alter behavior. Sort of like when a $1 billion dollar fine is imposed once even though the company earns $10 billion/year on the bad activity. That fine is just a cost of doing business and doesn't alter behavior.
However, there are some instances where the shift in money makes a difference. For example, Tesla gets money from GM and Ford through credits. That penalty doesn't affect GM and Ford behavior, but it does help
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The Tesla situation seems very much the exception, rather than the rule. If they money usually went into greener alternatives of the same type of tech, that'd be a hell of a lot better place than we are now. As it is? Lots of incentive for bad actors to claim they own some large forest somewhere just to be paid to do nothing.
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I feel you might be confusing emission allowances with offset credits.
Allowances financialize the maximum amount you're allowed to emit, based on the total amount of allowances available. whereas offset credits give you a good feeling that your waste will be taken care of somewhere else. Somewhat like the recycling fee.There appears to be a way to use offset credits to increase the total amount you're allowed to emit through allowances, but the mechanism gets a bit more complex.
note: coming from the EU, don
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Actually it wasn't. The concept itself was sound and founded on the principle that someone somewhere was doing *THE OPPOSITE* of $the_bad_thing. The issue is that this entire process was corrupted to become exactly as you described.
If you cut a tree down and burn it and pay me to plant a tree, that's a carbon credit as the concept was envisaged.
If you cut a tree down and burn it and pay me to simply not do anything to a tree that wasn't going to have anything done in the first place, well that's the corrupt
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Carbon credits are a cryptocurrency level scam.
If I pollute the shit out of location A but buy a bunch of carbon credits from a company in location B location A is still polluted as shit.
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Carbon credits are meant to tackle the GLOBAL problem of excess CO2 - so speaking of locations makes no sense.
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"How does that $1B help fix the pollution exactly?"
The way it's supposed to work is that the people getting the $1B don't emit $1B worth of carbon that they otherwise would have.
The problem is that the the people getting the $1B were not in fact going to emit any of the carbon they promised not to emit anyways, so nothing is accomplished, other than giving the right to continue emitting CO2 to the polluter.
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They are tax deductions. Not for you but are for "carbon sequestration investment".
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So, an example from my own personal experience:
I work with a nonprofit that operates at a remote wilderness site. We operate off a small run-of-the-river hydroelectric generating system that works well for us. Our neighbours in the valley, who are there long term to remediate an old mine site, burn roughly 750,000L of diesel a year to power their operations. Given that once of our core competencies is running a small hydro-electric power system, and one of our core values is reducing the carbon footprint in
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