I or any other Skeptic could have told them this back in the early part of the 21st Century
The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle
One evening in November, 2021, a group of men assembled at sundown on the terrace of the Ruckomechi Camp, a safari resort on the Zambezi River. Since arriving by private plane, they had gone out lion-spotting, boated down the river, and landed a giant tiger fish; now they were clinking gin-and-tonics. Hippos wallowed in the water below.
The party was led by Renat Heuberger, a forty-four-year-old Swiss entrepreneur with narrow eyes and a cropped copper beard. Heuberger was the chief executive of South Pole, the world’s largest carbon-offsetting firm, and he had come to Zimbabwe to fight off an urgent threat to his company.
A decade earlier, South Pole had signed a deal to sell carbon offsets from an effort to protect a vast swath of forest on the banks of Lake Kariba, upriver from the camp. The Kariba project, spanning an area ten times the size of New York City, was among the world’s first “avoided deforestation” programs; by deterring local people from chopping down trees, it promised to prevent the release of tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gas. Leading corporations, including Volkswagen, Gucci, Nestlé, Porsche, and Delta Air Lines, paid South Pole nearly a hundred million dollars for Kariba credits, allowing them to market goods or services as “carbon neutral.”
South Pole thus pioneered a model of carbon offsetting that has been counted among our best hopes for staving off climate catastrophe: a mechanism that diverts funds from polluters in wealthy countries to protect crucial ecosystems in the Global South. Heuberger, a kinetic, grandiloquent man, speaks expansively about his mission. “We’re here to save the climate,” he told me.
And these rich folks buy lots of offsets so they can continue living the highlife, like, taking long private fossil fueled flights. And the money didn’t really make it to the less well off folks, especially in the poor countries, and didn’t really do much of anything. It’s what the Warmists call “greenwashing” these days.
The head of South Pole’s sustainable-finance consultancy division, Rebecca Self, was concerned that the company was awarding “Climate Neutral” badges to clients who seemed to be making little meaningful effort to cut their emissions. But, she told me, when she raised these objections, Heuberger accused her of “sounding like an N.G.O.” and “trying to kill the projects.” (Heuberger maintains that he does not recall saying this, but in our conversations he repeatedly condemned environmental nonprofits, complaining about their “destructive all-out bashing” of the carbon market and even suggesting that such organizations are secretly chaos agents funded by the oil industry.) Not long afterward, Self learned that South Pole had helped the Qatar World Cup substantiate a carbon-neutrality claim that excluded most of the emissions from the construction of seven air-conditioned stadiums. She put her concerns in writing and resigned.
This is an incredibly long article, meant to be in the October 23rd edition, and you really, really have to dig in and read it to see what an utter scam this all is. Are the trees making a difference, if the Cult talking points about them sucking carbon pollution out of the air is correct? Are the companies really planting all those trees? There are reports of violence in low income/Indigenous areas to force compliance. But, they make companies and rich folks feel better about all the things they do that create massive carbon footprints.
If this is possible, then the Bureau of Land Management and National Parks Department have between them generated trillions of dollars worth of carbon “offsets”. The USA is already carbon neutral. In fact, we are in a carbon deficit. We need to turn on all those steel mills and coal plants just to break even. Or we can pay off the national debt and fully fund retirement accounts for every American from selling our carbon excess to Africa, China and india. Oh, but those countries don’t buy carbon credits… or anything else based on make-believe value.
WE’RE RICH! RICH!!
Carbon Dioxide is NOT a pollutant, and is a very low-grade heat-trapping gas. Its purpose in greenhouses is to promote faster, lusher plant growth. High humidity (Water vapor) helps keep them warmer. Carbon offsets are as big boondoggle as Daylight Savings Time and Multi-level Marketing.
Of course, carbon dioxide can be, and is, a pollutant. Not sure how a “very low-grade heat-trapping gas” is defined but carbon dioxide DOES slow the loss of heat from the Earth and contributes to global warming. Water vapor is largely self-regulating, except it is dependent on temperature (warmer air can hold more water vapor).
CO2 is not a pollutant. You’re either a liar or a dumbass.
CO2 is also self regulating. More in the atmosphere promotes more plant growth, which sucks up CO2. Negative feedback. There’s good evidence that the CO2 level is still recovering from the last ice age, when it dropped to near extinction levels.
To a certain extent CO2 is self-regulating. Up to this point, it’s clear the promoted plant growth has not sucked up excess CO2, since the atmospheric concentration has risen from 260 ppm to 420 ppm without slowing. The oceans also absorb much, if not most of the CO2, yet atmospheric CO2 continues to rise.
Every year CO2 reaches a peak in May-June and then drops a few ppm to a trough by Sep-Oct, attributed to the sequence of Southern and Northern hemisphere green plant growing seasons.
Buying and selling AIR!
Only an idiot…
I won’t tell Johnny if you guys won’t tell Johnny…
Jilly,
Who is Johnny??
???? Under Biden’s ” drill baby drill” oil and finished products is now the #1 valued export.
We are also producing more now than the Trump average
Is it again time for conservatives to wear tin foil hats to prevent facts from bursting their reality bubble?
Who’s Johnny? I believe he’s some crazy lib..but I’m repeating myself..
Johnny-you know who else is producing much more oil than the Trump average? Brandon’s friends the terror sponsoring Iranians
Jilly,
You’re mistaken. Even under the dysfunctional Trump, Iran produced much less than the United States. Currently, the United States produces 6 TIMES more crude oil than does Iran. US production under Brandon has passed that of Trump.
If Iran makes 10s of BILLIONs how much do the US producers bring in?
Nope-I was taking about under Brandon’s loosening of sanctions put in place by Trump, Iran is processing almost 10 times a day more oil than they were under Trump. More money for terror sponsoring Iran
On one hand we have to plant trees to generate carbon offsets. On the other Bill Gates hand, we have to cut down millions of trees and bury them to lower the carbon in the atmosphere. Is there a third hand?