Source: How This Popular Climate “Solution” Could Tank Our Progress | The New Republic
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What could be worth giving up a tenth of your country? The Liberian government reportedly plans to do exactly that and sell control of its intact rainforests to the scion of one of the world’s biggest fossil fuel producers.
A draft memorandum of understanding, leaked last month, between Liberia’s Ministry of Finance and Blue Carbon LLC—one of many companies started by a 38-year-old member of Dubai’s royal family, Ahmed Dalmook Al Maktoum—would commit the small African nation to hand over exclusive rights to one million hectares of forest lands. In exchange, Blue Carbon will transform that land into “environmental assets,” including carbon credits: essentially, sellable units of promised emissions reductions. Such credits are, in general, intended to offset actual pollution by businesses, individuals, or governments. They can be bought either as a voluntary means of reducing carbon footprints or as a way to comply with government climate goals and regulations.
The only problem is that carbon offsets of all kinds are increasingly being outed as total bullshit.
Over the last few years, a drumbeat of academic research and investigative reporting has painted a bleak picture of carbon offsets and the carbon markets through which they’re traded. Just this week, a team of journalists at CarbonBrief published an exhaustive explainer on offsets and the many damning studies poking holes in a practice that’s long been a darling of climate policy wonks. That includes a study now making its way through the peer review process, which estimates that only 12 percent of carbon-offset projects “constitute real emissions reductions.”
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