Who would have thought. Good it came out. Now get ready for absolutely nothing to happen or change based on that.
this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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People already stopped buying the offsets; their market value dropped to near zero as a result.
They likely switched to another, similarly scammy provider.
The whole market crashed. It's not just this scammer or that one
It's crashed and revived before, selling a feel-good drug that satisfies addictions to high-energy lifestyles, real-world impact was never the point.
Perhaps the EPA and other countries' equivalents needs to hire auditors that show up at random and audit orgs that sell them. If they are lying, fine fine them and press criminal charges.
Does anybody else have the feeling that this gets repeated as often as possible, to make goverment run carbon trdaing schemes less likely?
The problem is that a number of countries and sub-national governments set up carbon trading schemes, and they ended up full of fraudulent offsets. There's a lot of discussion about it right now because people are trying to figure out what to do about that.
I'm.... not the brightest person in the world but the very first time I heard of companies buying carbon credits that would cure their pollution the alarm bells went off.
I guess the politicians that fall for this kind of crap put the 'whale' in whale phishing.
Thats due to offsets and you can just kick them out of your emissions scheme like with the EU ETS
Funding effective forest projects in developing countries is an obvious challenge, but offsets are not any solution. I remember way back (COP2?), Brazil proposed the 'Clean Development Fund', in which southern governments would get some money from northern governments, based on historical responsibility for emissions. Most of the Envi-NGOs protested strongly against equity-based "tropical hot air" transfers to governments, reckoning there were too many bad governments, preferring a project-based system which they could influence better. So this morphed into the CDM, but the value of such credits was dependent on the Kyoto market. The back deal in Kyoto (I remember, was there) had been that US (watched by many NGOs and journalists) agrees a toughish target while Russia (watched by almost nobody) got a very weak one - the original "hot air", then one would buy credits from the other. After Bush pulled US out, the Russian (and other E.Europe) credits remained, which collapsed the market including CDM. But as the story posted here tells, the phoenix was reborn once, and probably will be again. The people who decide these things fly around on a cushion of "hot air" all the time - it's how they feel comfortable. In the final plenary of COPs (have sat through enough) they always clap a lot, because whatever the numbers (or lack of them) this flying circus show must go on. And those are UN diplomats, now imagine the "voluntary" business version in private.