Carbon credits have been around for a long time. They make a whole bunch of people, like Al Gore, rich, and allow the rich folks to keep living their big carbon footprint lives by essentially paying a fine. Many big companies pay them to greenwash their operations, and, really, they’re a scam. How many trees really get planted?
Politics has been called the art of the possible. Yet regarding climate change, this adage is flipped on its head — it’s the art of the impossible.
As the world prepares for COP 28, the 28th United Nations Climate Summit, we desperately need to shift our efforts to immediate, bold action that’s possible now. And far from diminishing our ambition, focusing on available actions can get the world back on track to make the impossible possible.(snip)
Among the many possible actions, we need “all of the above” to reduce emissions. Yet, few strategies offer as much opportunity for global, scalable, short-term benefit as carbon markets.
For governments, markets bring flexibility that can reduce the cost of meeting their commitments under the Paris Agreement by $250 billion per year in 2030, growing to a total of $21 trillion of mitigation cost savings between 2020 and 2050. These savings can be reinvested into climate action, raising ambitions to close the 24-billion-ton gap, which is why 83% of countries include the use of carbon markets in their climate commitments.
In the private sector, companies that buy carbon credits decarbonize twice as fast as those which do not. The reason is simple: If you put a price on carbon, which happens when you buy credits, you have an incentive to reduce emissions. Carbon markets give companies the opportunity to take responsibility for their emissions today, and for their past emissions, even as they work to decarbonize. In the climate crisis, the world should no longer accept unabated emissions. Markets offer a path forward.
In the Real World, those companies simply pass on those costs to the consumers. That’s it. Nothing more.
As a veteran of many UN Climate Summits, I value the global process that resulted in the Paris Agreement. I also understand the frustration inherent in such processes, with each summit following a predictable cycle of unrealistic optimism leading to missed targets and brokered compromises.
So, wait, Mary Grady is taking long fossil fueled trips to climate summits? Huh. One of the companies she’s involved in is Architecture for REDD+ Transactions. They plant trees, for one thing. I wonder how much they make off people buying carbon credits? Because that’s a big part of their business.
Read: Warmists Really Want Government To Go Heavy With Carbon Credits »
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