Book review: The Carbon Credit Crusader by Monty Nereim

A man in San Diego sets up a carbon credit exchange. He goes to prison. What's not to like?

A warning before you read this post. This book review contains lots of spoilers. Don’t read this review if you want to read the book. On the other hand, if you read this review, you may not want to read the book.

The book is about a “homeless”¹ man called Clayton Schultz who sets up a carbon credit exchange.

It’s great that the author Monty Nereim chooses an unhoused man as the hero of his book, and in doing so challenges stereotypes about unhoused people. The shortage and cost of housing in San Diego is a serious issue. But we learn practically nothing about what it’s like to be unhoused in San Diego, or about what the causes are, or how the problem might be addressed.

Maybe I’m expecting too much, but as an author, if you make your hero unhoused, shouldn’t you at least attempt to address some of these issues?

The book starts with Schultz returning to a camp on 16th Street in San Diego. He’d been in prison for two years after being caught using a fake COVID-19 vaccination card while trying to get on an aeroplane to go to his mother’s funeral.

While he was in prison, he had a counsellor who helped him stop drinking and taking drugs, and inspired him “to improve: personally, spiritually, and environmentally”. The counsellor said, “Do good and make a difference in the world.”

This crops up several times in the book. It’s a bit cheesy, but so what? More people doing good and making a difference in the world would be great.

The trouble is, Schultz is not such a great role model.

Schultz, and his homeless friends, carry out their first good deed by painting over a building covered in graffiti. A TV station interviews Schultz about the action.

Unfortunately, it’s gang-related graffiti. And the next day Schultz is knocked off his bicycle by tattooed gang members driving a van. He spends a couple of weeks in hospital recovering.

From there, he signs up for a three-month course on Climate Change Abatement at a Christian University that went out of business and was bought up by “the UN and the Climate Change Community”.

Nereim calls the course an “indoctrination program”.

And this, rather than the slightly bonkers storyline, is the main problem with this book. Instead of explaining the well-established science behind the climate crisis, Nereim raises a few straw man arguments based on what the lecturers say during the course.

Tree planting

One of the lecturers, for example, has written a book titled, “Reducing Carbon Footprints, One Tree at a Time”.

This should have been the perfect opportunity for Nereim to highlight some of the problems with tree planting as a climate solution. Nereim could have highlighted some of the extremely suspect “science” that backs the various trillion tree initiatives.

He could have focussed on the urgent need to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

Instead, Nereim has a student ask some questions about the albedo effect. As a recent paper published in Nature Communications notes, this is a genuine problem:

Restoring tree cover changes albedo, which is the fraction of sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface. In most locations, these changes in albedo offset or even negate the carbon removal benefits with the latter leading to global warming.

But it’s only one problem among many associated with the false solution of planting trees to address the climate crisis.

Carbon offsets

Another lecturer on the course is Tucker Rothschild. He’s the founder and CEO of Carbon Credit Exchange. Nereim describes how he’s “meticulously dressed in a dark blue pinstriped suit”. He’s also tall and handsome. “He’s obviously very rich,” Schultz thinks to himself.

“My firm trades in something nobody imagined twenty years ago,” Rothschild tells the students. Which suggests Nereim’s research into carbon offsets was ever so slightly superficial.

The reality is that carbon offsets have a history several decades long. The first land-based carbon offset project was set up 36 years ago.

Carbon Brief’s history of carbon offsets goes back as far as 1960 to Ronald Coase’s paper, “The Problem of Social Cost”. The Chicago Climate Exchange traded carbon credits from 2003 to 2010:

After the course Rothschild offers Schultz a job. He doesn’t take it. The description of the interview provides a good contrast between the rich and poor in the US.

But an underlying theme of the book is that Schultz is climbing out of poverty through hard work, risk taking, and sacrifice. It’s the American Dream, in other words.

Schultz gets his fellow homeless friends to start planting trees. Once again, TV stations turn up and Schultz becomes a minor celebrity. This may not be his best career move given that a bunch of tattooed gang members have already put Schultz in hospital for several weeks, but that doesn’t seem to bother Schultz (or Nereim) too much.

Schultz comes up with the idea of setting up his own carbon credit exchange. He sets up a scheme under which people can use the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon footprint calculator to measure their carbon footprint. Those with a small footprint can then trade carbon offsets on his exchange, and those with a larger footprint will buy them.

This is where the storyline really unravels. There are so many scandals, scams, frauds, and buffoonery associated with carbon markets, that if you’re going to make up a story about carbon trading, it had better be good.

Schultz’s carbon offsets are created with no verification or validation process. The whole thing relies on people being honest (based on a “sworn oath”) about their carbon footprint. Also, EPA’s carbon footprint calculator has to be accurate enough to generate carbon credits.

A 30 second cursory glance by anyone who has ever looked at carbon trading in any detail would have resulted in massive holes being poked through this part of the book’s storyline.

Nevertheless, Schultz’s carbon credit exchange takes off. Money pours in. Schultz uses the money to plant more trees.

At this point, I was hoping that Nereim might have a role for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to play in closing down Schultz’s dodgy carbon credits exchange. After all, Schultz is trading carbon credits that he simply cannot prove are genuine. That’s fraud, on a very large scale.

Instead, large transfers of money started appearing on Schultz’s exchange.

Schultz is subsequently arrested by the FBI. It turns out that terrorist organisations and drug dealers were using the exchange for money laundering. Schultz is sentenced to 20 years in prison.

After ten years, he’s pardoned by the US President, who Schultz met briefly before he set up the exchange. (The President that Schultz met was called Hornsby, or perhaps Hornsbey. The President he wrote to later in the book, saying “you may remember me” is called McCoy.)

I suppose, if you have almost superhuman powers to suspend disbelief, you might be able to go along with the idea all of this could have happened. But the reality of the world of carbon trading is far stranger, and far more interesting.

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1. Unhoused would probably be a better way of describing Schultz’s situation. 16th Street was his home. Nereim uses the word “homeless”.