A Nonprofit Promised To Preserve Wildlife. Then it Made Millions Claiming it Could Cut Down Trees 105
An anonymous reader shares a report from Technology Review: The Massachusetts Audubon Society has long managed its land in western Massachusetts as crucial wildlife habitat. Nature lovers flock to these forests to enjoy bird-watching and quiet hikes, with the occasional bobcat or moose sighting. But in 2015, the conservation nonprofit presented California's top climate regulator with a startling scenario: It could heavily log 9,700 acres of its preserved forests over the next few years. The group raised the possibility of chopping down hundreds of thousands of trees as part of its application to take part in California's forest offset program.
The program allows forest owners like Mass Audubon to earn so-called carbon credits for preserving trees. Each credit represents a ton of CO2. California polluters, such as oil companies, buy these credits so that they can emit more CO2 than they'd otherwise be allowed to under state law. Theoretically, the exchange should balance out emissions to prevent an overall increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. The Air Resources Board accepted Mass Audubon's project into its program, requiring the nonprofit to preserve its forests over the next century instead of heavily logging them. The nonprofit received more than 600,000 credits in exchange for its promise. The vast majority were sold through intermediaries to oil and gas companies, records show. On paper, the deal was a success. The fossil fuel companies were able to emit more CO2 while abiding by California's climate laws. Mass Audubon earned enough money to acquire additional land for preservation, and to hire new staff working on climate change. But it didn't work out as well for the climate.
The program allows forest owners like Mass Audubon to earn so-called carbon credits for preserving trees. Each credit represents a ton of CO2. California polluters, such as oil companies, buy these credits so that they can emit more CO2 than they'd otherwise be allowed to under state law. Theoretically, the exchange should balance out emissions to prevent an overall increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. The Air Resources Board accepted Mass Audubon's project into its program, requiring the nonprofit to preserve its forests over the next century instead of heavily logging them. The nonprofit received more than 600,000 credits in exchange for its promise. The vast majority were sold through intermediaries to oil and gas companies, records show. On paper, the deal was a success. The fossil fuel companies were able to emit more CO2 while abiding by California's climate laws. Mass Audubon earned enough money to acquire additional land for preservation, and to hire new staff working on climate change. But it didn't work out as well for the climate.
Wow (Score:1)
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What if it were your 9,700 acres ?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Not even. The TFS stops a little short and is missing some information that clarifies. While it did quote from TFA:
The Massachusetts Audubon Society (said) ... It could heavily log 9,700 acres of its preserved forests over the next few years.
That doesn't mean it *will* -- just that it *could*.
TL;DR: The Massachusetts Audubon Society has to say that it could/intends-to clear trees, but won't if they get the sweet carbon-credit money from CA. The California board won't give/pay them (and/or the project doesn't really work) if the trees aren't in any real danger.
TFA goes on to say:
In order for California’s system to work, carbon market experts say, the program must cause carbon savings that wouldn’t have happened in the absence of the program. If Mass Audubon had already planned to preserve the forest, then the carbon credits program is paying to save trees that were never at risk.
To the Air Resources Board, the landowner’s intent is not important. So long as the land could have been logged in a way that is legal, doesn’t lose money, and doesn’t exceed typical logging practices in that region, the agency’s rules treat the savings to the atmosphere as real.
Some offset researchers argue that the state’s approach allows landowners to claim credits for trees that were never in danger.
However improbable the idea might be of a conservation group actually permitting the removal of so much timber, Mass Audubon officials said they had simply followed the state’s rules in claiming that the society could heavily log its forest.
When asked whether the nonprofit intended to log to the levels laid out in the documents, Lautzenheiser did not directly answer.
Maybe there's more, but TFA is pretty long, with a lot of blah blah and I stopped after the above.
The last line is all you need to know (Score:1, Flamebait)
"But it didn't work out as well for the climate." It's yet another bullsh*t money laundering scheme.
The flaw is in the concept [Re:The last line ...] (Score:5, Interesting)
The ultimate problem is that cap-and-trade is actually an awkwardly stupid idea.
Economics theory says that the correct answer is to tax carbon emissions, with the optimum level of tax exactly equal to the value of the damage to the climate. In this case, if a corporation gets benefit from emitting carbon, they would only do so if the benefit they get is greater than the cost (that other people pay).
Unfortunately, the word "tax" is a poison word in today's political discourse. (You see that clearly here on slashdot: if anybody mentions "carbon tax", the AC brigade spams the comments with "see? It's the government trying to tax us to death. That proves it's all about the money, not the environment!").
"Cap and trade" is a way to implement the same result as a tax, less efficiently, but without that poison word. Effectively this is a tax, where the carbon-emitting companies pay a tax to the Audobon Society for emitting carbon. They just don't call it a tax.
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Whether or not a Pigouvian tax is actually optimal is not actually settled. But that's besides the point; the bigger issue is that we don't know the "value of the damage to the climate", not even to orders of magnitude.
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The GP is misinformed. All you have to do is make an assumption that reducing carbon is good. The tax has to be large enough that it encourages reduction in carbon emission, ideally just exactly that large. This is easily directly observed and measurable. It can have absolutely nothing to do with the damage the carbon is doing, except to assume that damage is greater than zero.
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Cap & Trade should be much better than a tax, because it allows free enterprise to choose the least expensive way to reduce the carbon. The cap does have to go down gradually over time. But in general I do not understand the opposition to it. It should produce less carbon for the same price, appeals to the idea that capitalism will do things better than collectivism, and so on.
Unfortunately I feel the reason it is rejected is because there are a lot of people who don't want to see it work.
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Cap & Trade should be much better than a tax, because it allows free enterprise to choose the least expensive way to reduce the carbon.
Your argument is flawed. With a tax, free enterprise will chose the least expensive way to reduce carbon, because it is something that is paid for. That's how enterprise works: when you have to pay for something, you reduce its usage, and do so by the least expensive option.
With cap and trade, industry chooses the least expensive option to buy credits. Which were allocated by fiat.
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Finding that number is nontrivial, of course. But no more difficult-- probably less difficult-- than finding the optimal cap level.
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But a tax works more efficiently.
What good does it do to tax fossil fuels if the same amount of carbon it harvested by cutting down trees? The tax did nothing to reduce the carbon footprint.
Trees [Re:competition and markets for the win.] (Score:2)
It would be valuable to do both: reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and also stop razing forests, and plant more trees.
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The carbon tax can also be revenue neutral, here they projected how much money the carbon tax would bring in and lowered income tax by that amount, along with rebates for the poor. Economy is (when no pandemic) booming though carbon has also increased, though hopefully not as much as as without the tax. It is painful seeing the highest gas prices in N. America though a lot of that is gouging. I live just outside an area with a 19.5 cent a litre transit tax so pay about a nickel a litre less for gas.
This is
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The correct answer depends on what your goals are.
One goal is to reduce CO2 emissions. Which a carbon tax could help. But setting that tax, and updating it regularly to continue providing downward pressure, is going to be hard.
Another goal is to fund the development and mass installation of low-CO2 infrastructure. A carbon tax isn't as good for that, because the people buying that infrastructure are not necessarily paying a carbon tax (at least, not directly).
For example, it would be good to fund the ins
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On the other hand, this land is now legally locked up against logging for the next 100 years. Without this carbon credit system, it would not be. (Imagine if we could get Brazil to do the same for the Amazon!)
So if your takeaway is that "we should not have carbon credit systems because they are just bullshit anyways," why? It accomplished at least some good here.
If your takeaway is, "we need to monitor this to make sure it is reducing the overall emissions a
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The complaint (which I agree is legit) is that the land was effectively locked up against logging for the next 100 years anyway. The Audubon Society was not going to send out bulldozers if they did not get the money. So the company gave this money so they could claim they "offset their carbon emissions" when actually what they did was donate to the Audubon Society and there was no change to total carbon emissions.
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The complaint (which I agree is legit) is that the land was effectively locked up against logging for the next 100 years anyway. The Audubon Society was not going to send out bulldozers if they did not get the money. So the company gave this money so they could claim they "offset their carbon emissions" when actually what they did was donate to the Audubon Society and there was no change to total carbon emissions.
The audubon society used to proceeds to purchase more land. That land too is now locked up against logging for the next 100 years, but would not have been otherwise. They paid for that by allowing an industry to emit a measured amount of additional CO2 today. CO2 emissions that would have happened anyway, with no benefit in trade, if this CA regulation didn't exist.
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Proceeds they earned for literally doing what they were going to do anyways. The emitting industry was then allowed to pay less for the environmental destruction they were causing, allowing them to continue emitting more for longer. Had they been forced to pay the full amount, maybe they would have decided that their business model required changes. Maybe they'd capture all of their emissions, or use the money to find greener solutions. Maybe they'd raise their prices, and the customers would have to pa
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The complaint (which I agree is legit) is that the land was effectively locked up against logging for the next 100 years anyway. The Audubon Society was not going to send out bulldozers if they did not get the money. So the company gave this money so they could claim they "offset their carbon emissions" when actually what they did was donate to the Audubon Society and there was no change to total carbon emissions.
That's true of many credit swaps anyway. Tesla is going to make cars no matter what credits it gets, it just needs credits to turn a profit. Some percentage of Tesla sales offset ICE vehicles, but some also are probably buyers who would have chosen some other EV instead; so in the ned every Tesla is not a true offset.
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If the EV company wasn't profitable, then they would close and sell no EV's.
The money helps them stay in business. Or expand their business faster. OR lower the price of their EV's. All good things for CO2.
The ICE cars get more expensive. Less demand for ICE cars, more demand for EV's. ICE car makers switch to EV's. All good things for CO2.
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If the EV company wasn't profitable, then they would close and sell no EV's. The money helps them stay in business. Or expand their business faster. OR lower the price of their EV's. All good things for CO2.
True, but unless they can become profitable on their core business alone their long term survival is questionable.
The ICE cars get more expensive. Less demand for ICE cars, more demand for EV's. ICE car makers switch to EV's. All good things for CO2.
No doubt the demand for EVs will pickup as more options are available and at some point ICE vehicles will be museum pieces or collector toys.
This was predicted by opponents of carbon credits (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon credits don't work, it allows companies like this and countries like China to buy up the carbon credits to fund more expansion. As long as there is a time gap between the carbon purchased/sold and the emission, it continues to be ineffective, even if you do it in 1 second increments, you can devise a scheme to infinitely extend the credit.
disincentive is the same either way (Score:3)
The fossil fuels were going to be burned, carbon credit or not. The only difference is whether the companies pay the penalty to the government or give the money to Audubon to not cut trees they weren't going to cut anyway.
Tesla plays the same game, sells carbon credits so the other car manufacturers can avoid the penalty. Tesla pretends to show a profit instead of that money going to the government.
Companies obviously find it financially worthwhile to buy the credits in the short term as changes are made (
Re:This was predicted by opponents of carbon credi (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, they were opponents of anything that involves lowering the amount of fossil fuels burned.
Which makes sense as soon as it's pointed out that the opposition is wholly funded by fossil fuel companies, that will lose trillions of dollars if people move away from burning fossil fuels.
(yeah, the Koch brothers made a great show of saying "we're funding think tanks to promote libertarian principles!' That smokescreen hid the fact that they are oil company tycoons, and the "libertarian principle" that they cared about was the liberty to burn the largest amount of oil possible at the highest price.)
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Yes, a carbon tax would be a better solution, but this is another case where you don't throw out something good in search of something perfect. This is a scheme where polluters help fund environmental protection. There are a lot of things like there were utilities fund conservation and solar projects.
But yes, the world is a better place because polluters in California are funding the purchase of land that will be protected.
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Carbon taxes has the same problem, as it is basically buying you extra allowances of carbon you shouldn't be emitting in the first place with the 'promise' that in the future the government may do something about it.
Which is just as asinine as every other government scheme, remember when social security was supposed to give you a secure income when you retired, but government wasted it instead of investing it and putting that money in even a regular bank savings accounts would've gotten you more money in th
First year economics [Re:This was predicted by...] (Score:2)
Carbon taxes has the same problem, as it is basically buying you extra allowances of carbon you shouldn't be emitting in the first place with the 'promise' that in the future the government may do something about it.
No.
It doesn't matter what the government does with the money; there is no "promise that in the future the government will" do anything at all. The benefit of carbon taxes is that it makes you pay a cost equal to the damage your carbon emissions cost; therefore, you do not emit carbon dioxide for no good reason.
First year economics.
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The benefit of carbon taxes is that it makes you pay a cost ...
Yup. Same as buying carbon credits. The cost to you is the same whether it's a tax or a credit.
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Carbon taxes has the same problem, as it is basically buying you extra allowances of carbon you shouldn't be emitting in the first place with the 'promise' that in the future the government may do something about it.
Carbon taxes make it more expensive to emit CO2.
That by itself is enough to be useful. It incentivizes more efficient use of carbon. It's now a monetary advantage to emit less CO2, where as before it was just virtue signaling.
On top of that you could also do useful things with the money. Invest in green energy research. Build more green energy. Invest in carbon sequestering technology. Plant some trees. Give it to poor people as an offset. Give it to poor people because they're poor. It doesn't really matt
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Carbon taxes make it trivially more expensive. That cost gets pushed down to the consumer. That was the case before carbon taxes as well, as any emission is by definition a loss, more efficient motors are only necessary if your competition is saving money by using more efficient motors and thus the price of goods he produces is lower than yours.
Artificially raising the prices of doing business through taxes benefits the status-quo as the big corporations like Amazon have sufficient cash to pay taxes both sh
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Carbon taxes make it trivially more expensive.
Then make the tax higher.
That cost gets pushed down to the consumer.
That's the point...the consumer will consume something else with less carbon, or won't consume at all.
Artificially raising the prices of doing business through taxes benefits the status-quo as the big corporations like Amazon have sufficient cash to pay taxes both short and long-term to pressure startups out of the market.
So is it getting pushed to the consumer or not? Make up your mind...
You think Amazon likes making less money? If they are willing to spend that money to buy customers, why not spend the same money to reduce carbon? They could even virtue signal that they are green and gain more customers too.
I don't think you are understanding the point.
Either the customers will have to pay more
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As an opponent, I'm not funded by fossil fuels.
The opposition is funded by fossil fuel industry. You listen to the vast garbage dumpsters of half-truths and misinformation funded by that opposition.
It's nice to generalize people so you can demonize them, though, isn't it. It's much easier to blame some conspiracy of the rich, a lack of education or a number of other things than accept that not everyone actually agrees with your plan.
In general, it's a good idea to be skeptical of conspiracy theories; the question "how could that many people keep it secret?" is a good one to ask. In this particular case, however, it wasn't even secret. It was the American Petroleum Institute putting out a memo to its members saying "we need to address this before it impacts our profit. Here is our propo
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Carbon stays in the atmosphere for centuries, so actually reducing carbon emission in 10 years somewhere will offset carbon being emitted right now.
The complaint here is that they were not actually reducing carbon emission at all. They were paying somebody a "ransom" to not emit more carbon, with the further twist that it highly unlikely that somebody would emit that carbon even if not paid the ransom. In reality they were donating to a charity, but they colluded so they could claim that they were offsettin
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It depends who you give the credits to.
The original proposals was to give them to people. Similar to a UBI, everyone would be given X carbon credits per year. That would greatly reduce the incentive to game the system, because you couldn't just create a new corporation to get a large pile of credits.
But giving things to people instead of corporations is a sin against St. Reagan, so we can't do that!!
So we now have attempts to grant credits to corporations, which is way more game-able since the credits are
Logical extension of carbon credits (Score:5, Insightful)
This works out exactly like the people who invented "carbon credits" intended - make money off of doing nothing, "So long as it is the right kind of nothing."
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Sure... and yet, everything kind of worked out no?
The non-profit got money preserving forests, which isn't a bad idea in and of itself is it? We always talk about negative externalities, like how pollution should have a cost. Isn't this a kind of positive externality. Positive actions like preserving a forest have a benefit.
The non-profit was actually able to buy more land, preserving more forest.
To be clear, I'm not a fan of carbon taxes or credits. I personally think we get out of this mess via R&D, n
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The problem is the imbalanced value proposition presented by carbon credits. The absolute monetary amounts are proportionally worth much more to Mass Audubon than to the polluters. Carbon credits are designed to benefit the polluters. Clearly the market is flooded with credits which are vastly underpriced.
Kudos to Mass Audubon for gaming the system for their own altruistic purposes, but they should realize that this system is designed to value real short-term profits over any claimed long-term effectiven
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The non-profit was actually able to buy more land, preserving more forest.
I think you misspelled "the Audobon society executives were able to pay themselves more money" They claim they will use it to buy more land but there is no proof they have done that. In the meantime the administration continues to draw salary.
Running a large nonprofit has to be one of the biggest gravy trains in existence.
Re:Logical extension of carbon credits (Score:4, Informative)
According to Charity Navigator, the Mass Audobon Society (net assets $275M) pays 0.74% of its money to the one leader that gets paid - the president. He earns a whopping $243K.
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If you think thats all the money involved then you obviously dont know how the system works.
NO ONE is stupid enough to make their money from up front salaries, it will all be through consulting fees, side contracts, travel expenses, etc, etc.
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>>NO ONE is stupid enough to make their money from up front salaries, it will all be through consulting fees, side contracts, travel expenses, etc, etc.
Right.
Because this is America, nobody does ANYTHING for ANY reason other than to make money. To actually care about anything else is STUPID.
Case closed.
Re: Logical extension of carbon credits (Score:2)
But the summary says funds from the credits paid Mass Audobon's expansion, as in Mass Audubon bought more land to conserve. /shrug
Wood cheaply sequesters carbon (Score:5, Interesting)
If we use massively more wood via forest farming we can sequester an enormous amount of carbon. Wood is 50% carbon, and can be land-filled or otherwise used for long term storage of the carbon that went into it. A million pounds of forest grown and harvested is 500,000 pounds of carbon. And you MAKE money doing it! You add to human prosperity and at the same time sequester carbon.
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We need to stop treating our furniture (and homes) like a disposable cardboard box for our (also disposable) things, glued together with oil products.
We need homes and the things in it to be multigenerational heirlooms - not plastic garbage we keep re-buying every few years.
For that we need not only for things to be fixable (right to repair to be as sacrosanct as freedom of speech) but also affordable, permanent, housing (right to eat, clothes, medical help and to a home should be literally the same as the
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As I was saying before some landlord tried to evict the reality that he is a parasite...
We need to stop treating our furniture (and homes) like a disposable cardboard box for our (also disposable) things, glued together with oil products.
We need homes and the things in it to be multigenerational heirlooms - not plastic garbage we keep re-buying every few years.
For that we need not only for things to be fixable (right to repair to be as sacrosanct as freedom of speech) but also affordable, permanent, housing
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wood is 50% carbon, and can be land-filled or otherwise used for long term storage of the carbon that went into it
It's only storage if it's permanently in inert atmosphere and entirely sterile. Otherwise, it will decay and release CO2 again.
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Green rent-seeking (Score:1)
Chris Rock had a pretty good bit back in the 90s. Y'all know which one I'm talking about.
The best line in it, in my opinion, isn't any of the ones involving the n-bomb per se, but the one that goes:
I take care of *my* kids...
You're supposed to, you dumb motherfucker! What do you want, a sticker?!
Same thing here. Can I sell some green credits for *not* chopping down my tree that I wasn't going to chop down anyway?
How about the one I had removed a few years ago that was threatening to fall over on my neighbor's house? Should I have been green and rolled the dice and left it alone?
Seems right (Score:2)
No difference to climate (Score:2)
I am much happier that more forest land will be preserved than a little bit of CO2 was emitted that would have been emitted anyway.
If the oil companies din't buy the credits from Audubon they would have just got them elsewhere. So why is it not good all around more forests have been preserved?
Problem is the system, not the Audubon Society (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think it is hypocritical for a landowner to receive credit for not logging just because they weren't planning on doing so to begin with. Why shouldn't someone who has cared for land for decades not get the same credit as someone who has just now decided to stop doing further harm? Members of the Audubon society may question whether enabling companies to generate more CO2 pollution is consistent with their values though.
The bigger problem is that allowing such broad and varied credits completely undermines the purpose of cap and trade. If you limit cap and trade to a small well defined set of industries (car manufacturers, electric generating stations, etc), then you can easily measure what the current emissions are and decide on an acceptable level of emissions (the cap), and then allow the market do decide how to allocate that pollution to meet that goal. There are legitimate reasons for different cars to have different fuel efficiencies, and good reasons to keep old plants running until their end of life. Nor is there any good reason why each company needs to have a broad enough portfolio of products to meet those goals individually (McLauren should not have to make enough compliance cars to offset their emissions if Tesla is willing to do it for them).
But once you start allowing anything and everything that could increase or decrease emissions into the pool, then it is impossible to measure what the base level of effective emissions are, and thus impossible to set a meaningful cap. It was a stupid idea when the EU did it, and it was even stupider for California to allow them after they had already seen the problem that EU had with carbon credits. They really need to revamp the entire program if they want to get serious about meeting carbon goals.
Perfection is an illusive target (Score:2)
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Members of the Audubon society may question whether enabling companies to generate more CO2 pollution is consistent with their values though.
Absolutely, this. Saying they are not going to do something that they were not going to do anyway, just to make money enabling a company to pollute is contrary to the design of the Audubon Society. They should have their charter revoked, lose their tax exempt status, etc.
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/s
Carbon Credits are a total scam (Score:2, Interesting)
I was taking a Portuguese class at night at a local community college a few years back. In our class was a businessman who was in the carbon credit industry. He was there to learn Portuguese so he could navigate the business waters in Brazil, where he would go lease uninhabitable land in the rainforests from the government, and then uses those leases to secure "nondevelopment carbon credits," which he then sold to oil and gas companies for millions.
There was no possibility of that land ever being developed
How many times can you sell the same thing? (Score:2)
Fraud was committed.
Either fraud in getting paid to preserve these forest,
or fraud in soliciting and getting donations to preserve the forests.
How many instances of mail fraud for the donations?
Federal wire fraud for cross state scam.
Will this previously respectable preservation group loose their non-profit status as a result of this fraud?
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Who do you think wrote the carbon credit rules?
It'd be a shame if something happened... (Score:2)
...to those trees.
Where have I heard a line like that before?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes... [knowyourmeme.com].
Offset Credits Don't Work - Loophole Mentality (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds a lot like fraud. (Score:1)
Climate Change is a Scam (Score:1)
Oh. Geez. What's wrong with this??? (Score:1)
What If... (Score:1)
So, what happens to the credits if a wildfire sweeps through and releases all the stored carbon? Are they then lost until the trees regrow?
They bought additional land (Score:4)
The entire summary paints everything in a bad light right until the bottom line, it says the money was used to buy more land i.e. converting more of nature into a reserve.
The core problem here is the stupid people who wrote the law thinking that this would have an affect. Today I didn't buy a Ferrari, that does not mean I earned $200k today or that my net worth has changed.
This offset program needs to be combined with ... wait for it ... actually planting trees.
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This offset program needs to be combined with ... wait for it ... actually planting trees.
Nope. The benefit is in not cutting down trees that are already sequestering carbon.
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Errr no. That's not how emission offsetting works. You can just point and say "See that carbon in the tree over there, I'm not going to burn it so give me a free pass while I set this dead dinosaur on fire."
The benefit is in not cutting down trees, *AND PLANTING NEW ONES*.
Forests bad (Score:1)
Forests donâ(TM)t support wildlife. Any basic biologist knows that. They are crappy for wildlife. The edges of forest and clearings in them or what support wildlife. Places where there are new growth and varied fauna. Itâ(TM)s called forest management.
Trading crimes is beyond stupid (Score:2)
Would it make sense for me to sell a 'murder credit' to another person, because they want to kill someone and I don't? How does this make things better? If someone is doing harm, they should have no way to legitimise it by paying money.
New England Forestry Foundation (Score:1)
actually does harvest trees on its "protected" property. They don't claim to be tree huggers, they are farmers. However they allow wealthy landowners to "donate" their land to the non-profit in exchange for privacy and a huge tax deduction. https://newenglandforestry.org... [newenglandforestry.org]
Scumbag traitors! (Score:1)
Re: The Law of Gravity... (Score:1)
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The AC is, of course, correct. Reducing the small trees makes it harder for fires to spread up into the canopy, and trees are healthier, so you end up with fewer dead trees that are a higher fire risk.
And turning forests into timber is a great approach for sequestering carbon. The carbon captured in that timber isn't going to go anywhere (unless the forest and the house within it burns, of course), and the removed trees will be replaced by other trees that sequester more carbon.
Similarly, the paper indus
Re: The Law of Gravity... (Score:1)
This is the Audubon Society, though. The puropse of preserving these forests is about more that the most efficient utilitarian use of the wood.
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But preserving the forests in a way that keeps them from catching fire in five years is still meeting their goals. And that pretty much requires some amount of cutting, even if you're just taking out dead trees. And if you have to do that anyway, you might as well figure out the best use of the wood.
wood will always decay back to atmosphere (Score:2)
Eventually all lumber is replaced thrown out, decays and goes back into the atmosphere. It is not long term carbon storage if it's anywhere in the atmosphere or on the surface. In ancient times when the coal & oil was formed, fungi & bacteria had not evolved the ability to break down much of wood---so it built up literally in the soil, got compressed, and turned into coal. Now life has found a way to do that, so any of that carbon brought up and burned will nearly always stay in the atmosphere.