Ya think? Bloomberg was all over this story in December as the Nature Conservancy was selling forest credits they said they would set aside. Land that had already been put in trust or otherwise taken out of production, by others. Phi Scamma Jamma
TNC is "Big Green", $7.87 billion of gross assets on the books, $6.966 billion net.
$748,787,000 in annual revenue.
Big Green.
From Bloomberg via Canada's National Post, April 5:
Following concerns that it is facilitating the sale of meaningless carbon credits to corporate clients, the Nature Conservancy says it’s conducting an internal review of its portfolio of carbon-offset projects. The nonprofit owns or has helped develop more than 20 such projects on forested lands mostly in the U.S., which generate credits that are purchased by such companies as JPMorgan Chase & Co., BlackRock Inc., and Walt Disney Co., which use them to claim large reductions in their own publicly reported emissions.
The self-examination follows a Bloomberg Green investigation last year that found the world’s largest environmental group taking credit for preserving trees in no danger of destruction. The internal review is a sign that it’s at least questioning some practices that have become widespread in the environmental world, and could carry implications for the broader market for carbon credits.
While the Nature Conservancy declined to answer specific questions about the review, it said in a statement that it aims to meet the highest standards with its carbon projects and that the inquiry will be led by scientists and a “team of experts with deep project knowledge.”
Selling credits for well-protected trees potentially undermines the sustainability efforts of some of the world’s biggest companies. Each carbon offset is supposed to represent the reduction of one ton of planet-warming emissions that would have otherwise spewed into the atmosphere without intervention. Around the world, a wide variety of offset projects do everything from protect mangrove forests to destroy heat-trapping gases from landfills and coal mines. But offset payments channeled to already safe ecosystems don’t fundamentally change the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
“The way the Nature Conservancy has gone about this is unconscionable,” says Charles Canham, a forest ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a longtime board member of a local chapter of the Conservancy. Canham reached out to staff members at the Conservancy days before Bloomberg’s article was published in December to urge a different approach to carbon offsets. One of his key concerns is how the nonprofit calculates the number of credits it sells.
Every offset project is measured against a so-called “baseline scenario,” an estimate of what would have happened in the absence of carbon revenue. For forest offsets, the difference between the existing trees and the theoretical trees in the baseline scenario determines the amount of carbon credits that get to be sold.
But lax rules have allowed project developers to make unlikely claims that huge numbers of well-protected trees were going to be cut. In the case of the Conservancy, many of its projects claim the forests would have been harvested aggressively–much as a commercial timber company would do–in the absence of carbon payments. While this allows the nonprofit to sell more carbon credits, Canham says it doesn’t realistically reflect how a conservation group would manage its land....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
The folks who, fifteen years ago, were likening carbon credits to the old skool Catholic church selling indulgences to absolve rich parishioners of their sins were not that far off. The credits basically allow you to continue doing what you were doing or, as US climate czar John Kerry said when jetting off to Iceland in his private plane to receive a climate change leadership award:
“If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me
who is traveling the world to win this battle”
Roger that, only choice, over.
And from the Oakland Institute, a group that, like Farmlandgrab keeps tabs on the land, the headline story:....
