Pirate's Cove

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.

Read: Uber-Liberal New Yorker Notices Carbon Credits Are A Scam »