The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions…
Verra, which is based in Washington DC, operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its verified carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than 1bn carbon credits. It approves three-quarters of all voluntary offsets. Its rainforest protection programme makes up 40% of the credits it approves and was launched before the Paris agreement with the aim of generating revenue for protecting ecosystems.
@DrBob2 sorry to say, whenever I hear about negotiations to allocate massive amounts of money to “protect ecosystems” in countries where people work for $2 a day, my first thought is “90% of this money will end up in the offshore accounts of the country’s leaders.”
True ecosystem protection happens on the ground. A trickle of money to the hands that do the work would be orders of magnitude more effective than a boatload of money to the so-called “leaders.”
Probably the case. At the same time, these sorts of programs have problems even when implemented.
"When we looked at satellite tracking of carbon levels and logging activity in California forests, we found that carbon isn’t increasing in the state’s 37 offset project sites any more than in other areas, and timber companies aren’t logging less than they did before…
“Studies have already shown that projects are often overcredited at the beginning and might not last as long as expected. In this case we’re finding a bigger issue: a lack of real climate benefit over the 10 years of the program so far.”
Scale is not the problem; the issue is that there isn’t any difference/change/delta.
“When we looked at satellite tracking of carbon levels and logging activity in California forests, we found that carbon isn’t increasing in the state’s 37 offset project sites any more than in other areas, and timber companies aren’t logging less than they did before…”
As someone once said, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Sean Hannity’s anti-carbon control narrative is usually “China isn’t doing anything, so why should we?” The speaker at Oxford was working the same narrative. words to the effect “poor countries are not going to do anything, so it’s pointless for the rich countries to do anything”.
The amount of fossil fuels being used globally has been rising. Making any dent can not then be said to be minor when the problem is getting worse. A dent matters. We can not order China and India to simply stop. We cant order us or the EU to simply stop.
That does not equate to giving up or failing longer term.
Scale does matter. It is tens of billions of dollars but as I am saying fossil fuels are being more heavily used.
What is meant by phantom carbon positions? Who sets up the phantom credit?
LIMBONG: So Lula took office this week and has pledged to protect the Amazon, and it’s not the first time he’s done so. You know, he was president of Brazil from 2004 to 2011, and during that time, deforestation went down by nearly 75% thanks to his work with Environmental Minister Marina Silva. Right? And now that Lula’s back in office and has reappointed Silva, what do their plans look like from here on out?
Steve, I’ll repeat what I wrote to Wendy:
Scale is not the problem; the issue is that there isn’t any difference/change/delta.
“When we looked at satellite tracking of carbon levels and logging activity in California forests, we found that carbon isn’t increasing in the state’s 37 offset project sites any more than in other areas, and timber companies aren’t logging less than they did before…”
Ignoring the fact that California is not in a dome, and shares the air with the rest of the world, would not the data you cite indicate that the offset program was working, as there was no reduction in logging, and no increase in carbon? Of course, Cali is not in a dome, and any change locally would not make a measurable difference in the global atmosphere.
Not really. Since there was no difference in carbon dioxide or logging it means the program made no difference at the sellers end. The difference was that the buyers of the credits didn’t have to reduce their emissions to meet whatever goals or regulations had been set (either greenwashing or emission reduction in the state of X% by year Y).
Even the legitimate programs inspired little confidence. The U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism had issued more than a billion carbon credits—three-quarters of which researchers later found to be environmentally dubious…
The previous year had marked a decade since Kariba was launched, which meant that South Pole was required by Verra to check its explosive predictions against reality. After months of reviewing satellite imagery, the company’s data analysts had determined that deforestation in the control zone was dramatically lower than projected. They estimated that only fifteen million of the forty-two million carbon credits generated by the project had actually been backed by avoided emissions. All the rest of those supposedly offset tons of carbon simply weren’t real.
