GREEN+: A massive programme to financialise and trade the carbon in Latin America’s forests

Or, “The Carbon Credit Coup”.

“Democratizing access to global citizenship to stop the loss of all subnational protected areas on the planet.” That’s the claim of of a programme launched in 2022, called GREEN+, which stands for Government Reduction of Emissions for Environmental Net + Gain.

GREEN+ states that it is “anchored by state-of-the-art satellites, processed data, AI technology and integrated tools to protect and increase forests by 30% by 2030”.

GREEN+ was created by an alliance of CC35 (a US-based not-for-profit organisation called American Capital Cities Facing Climate Change), Cercarbono (a Colombia-based carbon certification firm), EcoRegistry (a Delaware registered blockchain registry for carbon credits), Global Footprint Network (a California-based NGO), Isolas (a Gibraltar-based law firm), Lockton (a US-based insurance broker) , R20 (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Regions of Climate Action - now called Catalytic Finance Foundation), RSK (a crypto firm incorporated in Gibraltar), Satellogic (a Delaware incorporated satellite Earth Observation corporation), and The Energy Coalition (a US-based energy efficiency company).

Here’s how GREEN+ explains what it plans to do:

Under this Programme, the existing carbon in effectively conserved protected areas of a sub-national jurisdiction (subject to some discounts based on risk and inaccessibility) is recognised as carbon credits. These credits are traded on the offset market, and income is deposited in a trust fund to guarantee the future conservation of protected areas and to generate new jurisdictional decarbonisation initiatives.

The programme consists of two phases. In 2022, the pilot phase started with six sub-national jurisdictions and six capital districts. In 2024, the second phase allows for “open participation of all interested jurisdictions and capital cities”.

According to a recent press release, GREEN+ will begin in 2025 and “aims to secure all Subnational Protected Areas on the planet and promote the creation of greater conservation incentives with the goal of increasing protected areas to 30% by 2030”.

The carbon credits will be traded by the GREEN+ Programme and the money from the sale of carbon credits will be held by the GREEN+ Trust, which consists of members of the GREEN+ Executive Board, and representatives of Isolas, Lockton, and RSK.

The money will subsequently be released to the jurisdictional initiatives over a period of 10 years, provided the targets set out in the project description document are achieved.

In a Programme Description report, GREEN+ explains that projects, “may be renewed separately for each subsequent project per the GREEN+ protocol or relevant methodologies”.

The carbon credits are to be certified by Cercarbono and will be registered by EcoRegistry. Cercarbono was launched in 2016 in Colombia, shortly after the government passed a law establishing a carbon tax. In 2018, Cercarbono set up a partnership with EcoRegistry.

These two organisations are involved in the Boko Rokarire project in Colombia:

According to the GREEN+ Programme Description report,

Deforestation monitoring and verification in the jurisdiction (including protected areas that are part of the initiative) will be carried out annually, remotely and by a third party (Satellogic).

A consortium of companies called Global Carbon Parks is also involved in the GREEN+ programme. Global Carbon Parks aims to transform protected areas into “natural equity” and to “develop, certify, and convert carbon storage and sequestration into tradable and liquid commodities”.

Down the rabbit hole

Last month, Bitcoin Magazine published an article about GREEN+ written by Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin. Titled, “Debt from Above: The Carbon Credit Coup”, the article starts as follows:

Latin America is quietly being forced into a carbon market scheme through regional contractual obligations – enforced by the satellites of a US intelligence-linked firm – which seeks to create an inter-continental “smart grid,” erode national and local sovereignty, and link carbon-based life to the debt-based monetary system via a Bitcoin sidechain.

Whitney Webb was senior investigative reporter at MintPress News, before setting up her own website Unlimited Hangout. Mark Goodwin writes for Unlimited Hangout and is the editor of Bitcoin Magazine.

Here’s how Webb describes what she does in a December 2023 podcast:

In general, I basically cover intelligence, Silicon Valley, all sorts of stuff sort of in that sphere, but with the Covid era, for example, I also got into some biosecurity stuff, and you know, all sorts of things sort of looking at how governments and corporations are in bed together and really not any fundamentally different than organised crime. But lately I've been doing a lot more on like financial stuff specifically.

So, let’s take the red(d) pill and follow Webb and Goodwin down the rabbit hole.

It’s a pretty wild ride. World Resources Institute (to give just one example) is described by Webb and Goodwin as “a World Economic Forum affiliate and contractor to suspected CIA front USAID that is focused on resource ‘sustainability’”.

WRI is funded by the US and several European governments, billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg as well as Google, Meta/Facebook, the Soros family’s Open Societies Foundations, the UN, Walmart, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, among others.

Unfortunately, Webb and Goodwin don’t mention that World Resources Institute was also involved in the world’s first ever carbon offset project, a tree planting project in Guatemala to offset emissions from an AES Corporation coal-fired power plant in the USA.

Nevertheless, Webb and Goodwin’s article does raise the alarm about a consortium of mainly US-based companies that is proposing a huge carbon trading scheme in Latin America.

The following is an look at some of the organisations involved in GREEN+. Lots more information about the “predatory figures” that are linked to these companies is available in Webb and Goodwin’s article.

CC35

CC35 or Capital Cities of the Americas Facing Climate Change (Ciudades Capitales de las Americas frente al Cambio Climático) aims to accelerate the commitment of American capital cities to address the climate crisis.

CC35 launched in December 2019 at COP25 in Madrid, where CC35 presented 500 green infrastructure projects for Latin American and Caribbean cities. The projects were excepted to raise between US$5 and US$8 billion.

In a 2019 interview with BNamericas, Sebastián Navarro, general secretary of CC35, explained that CC35 was launched by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s R20 - Regions of Climate Action (now called Catalytic Finance Foundation) and Leonardo DiCaprio’s 100 Climate Solutions.

In 2019, Navarro mentioned two funds that provided finance for CC35’s projects: BlueOrchard in Geneva; and Pegasus Capital in New York.

Pegasus Capital was founded by Craig Cogut who in the 1980s worked as a lawyer for Drexel Burnham Lambert’s “junk bond” division in California.

Another employee at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the 1980s was Richard Sandor. While he was working at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Sandor developed “collateral mortgage obligations”, one of the innovative financial products that led to the 2008 financial crisis. He also helped develop pollution trading in the 1980s and 1990s. Then he founded the Chicago Climate Change, which collapsed in 2010.

CC35’s secretariat is in Miami, Florida - a not for profit company called CC35 Capital Cities Secretariat, Inc. was registered in Florida on 16 January 2024.

In the press release announcing GREEN+ and Satellogic’s agreement, CC35’s secretary general, Sebastián Navarro, said,

We will be relentless from the governance of the GREEN+ Program with those who want to continue playing with the future of humanity. Thanks to this robust agreement with Satellogic, the global citizenry will have access to real-time information on deforestation, its changes month-by-month, and the sources that are producing them. This will also generate unprecedented credibility among investors of the carbon credits produced by conservation, as it will produce a double circular target; half of the funds from conservation will go directly to decarbonization.

Mario Durán, mayor of San Salvador, will be the next president of CC35, according to an announcement dated October 2023. In November 2021, Durán signed an agreement with CC35 for an education programme in the use of Bitcoin. Earlier in 2021, El Salvador became the first country in the world to use Bitcoin as legal tender.

More than 15,000 local governments in Latin America have signed agreements through CC35’s Alcades por el Clima (Mayors for the Climate) initiative. These agreements include carbon trading schemes.

Global Footprint Network

The Global Footprint Network was founded in 2003 by Mathis Wackernagel and Susan Burns. The organisation’s mission is “to help end ecological overshoot by making ecological limits central to decision-making”. On its website, it claims to be “changing how the world manages its natural resources”.

Mathis Wackernagel completed his PhD in 1994 at the University of British Columbia. His dissertation created the ecological footprint concept along with a method for calculating it.

In 2007, Wackernagel told the New Scientist that,

We are harvesting trees faster than they can regrow; taking nutrients from soils faster than they can be replenished; depleting fish stocks faster than they can restock; and emitting carbon dioxide into the air faster than nature can reabsorb it. Overshoot will ultimately liquidate the planet's ecological assets.

And in 2008, Wackernagel told the New York Times that the phrase “environmental footprint” got “its biggest boost in 2005 through an enormous BP media campaign on the carbon footprint”.

Wackernagel is right, apart from the date. In 2004, the PR company Ogilvy & Mather worked on an advertising campaign for BP. The purpose of the campaign was to deflect the blame for the climate crisis away from oil giants like BP and on to individuals. BP launched its carbon footprint calculator in 2004, so that individuals would see that it’s their everyday actions that are driving ever increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

“So, how do we design our future?” the Global Footprint Network asks on its website, and provides a tool showing “humanity’s ecological footprint”. Using the tool, “we” can reduce footprint per person (measured in hectares), fertility rate (measured in children born per woman), among other variables.

It’s all uncomfortably neo-Malthusian. In 2000, The Corner House put out a briefing titled “The Malthus Factor”.¹ The briefing highlights what’s missing from this type of analysis:

Attributing conflicts arising from resource scarcity to Malthusian pressures rather than, say, neo-colonialism or neo-liberalism, meanwhile, serves the function of making Western interventions appear more benign. This function is especially important given that the injunction of neo-Malthusians that “we” must learn to live within limits does not embrace the field of defence expenditure, the linchpin of postwar capitalist political economy. Such spending can only be justified by fostering the general impression that the world remains a threatening place despite the end of the Cold War.

The Energy Coalition

The Energy Coalition was founded in 1975 by John Phillips. It was created as the California Energy Coalition following the Middle East oil embargo and energy shortages in the US (and elsewhere). The focus of the organisation is energy efficiency and “clean energy”.

The Energy Coalition runs an education programme that receives funding from Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison, SDGE and SoCalGas.

The Energy Coalition is involved in a partnership in California involving smart homes, digital identities, energy credits, digital wallets, a reward-payment system, and “an energy social network”.

RSK

Rootstock, or RSK, created a Bitcoin sidechain. Rootstock co-founder Adrian Eidelamn explains what a sidechain does:

“Sidechains are basically technology to extend the capabilities of Bitcoin. In the case of Rootstock, those new capabilities are around smart contracts — but it could be anything like faster blocks and privacy. The idea is to unlock things that Bitcoin cannot do.”

RSK’s Diego Gutiérrez was an early promoter of Bitcoin and runs Bitcoin Argentina.

RSK is a founding member of GREEN+. “Presumably, the goal is to run GREEN+’s digital carbon market on the same blockchain,” Webb and Goodwin write.

Lockton

Lockton is the world’s third largest privately held insurance brokerage firm. The company is a founding member of GREEN+ and Global Carbon parks.

In 2023, David Briscoe, Lockton’s head of digital integration and special projects wrote about the opportunities that carbon markets present for the insurance industry.

Briscoe outlines some of the risks involved in buying carbon credits:

• CO₂ leakage from storage, pipeline failures, or seismic activity;

• Destruction of forests by fire, wind, or drought;

• Failure to deliver forward purchased credits;

• The voluntary carbon market lacks transparency;

• New technology may not perform as predicted;

• Fraud and negligence;

• Start-ups involved in the voluntary carbon market may go into insolvency.

Briscoe’s solution doesn’t address any of these problems in terms of the impact on the climate. Instead, he uses these risks in order to sell insurance:

In light of such risks, many buyers of carbon removal credits will seek to limit their balance sheet exposures. By purchasing insurance protection, buyers can ensure they have indemnity for non- or under-performance of the carbon removal credit at specified delivery dates.

Webb and Goodwin write that,

Presumably, Lockton’s involvement with GREEN+ means that Lockton will be insuring the mass of carbon credits to be produced by the program, which plans to harvest carbon credits from all of the world’s “subnational protected areas.”

Satellogic

Satellogic was founded in 2010 by Emiliano Kargieman and Gerardo Richarte. The company claims to be “the first vertically integrated geospatial company, driving real outcomes with planetary-scale insights”.

Satellogic is creating a “fully automated” Earth Observation platform, “with the ability to remap the entire planet at both high-frequency and high-resolution, providing accessible and affordable solutions for customers”.

Satellogic’s Board of Directors includes Donald Trump’s secretary of Treasury, Steven Mnuchin. After Trump lost the 2020 election, Mnuchin (a former-Goldman Sachs banker) set up Liberty Strategic Capital, a private equity fund.

In September 2021, the New York Times reported that Liberty Strategic Capital had raised US$2.5 billion, including investments from sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East. These include Saudi Arabia, where Mnuchin travelled often as Treasury secretary.

Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump, is senior managing director of Liberty Strategic Capital. Dunford is also on the board of Satellogic.

Liberty Strategic Capital has invested US$150 million in Satellogic.

Satellogic plans to have more than 300 satellites providing “sub-meter resolution imaging of the Earth updated on a daily frequency”.

Under the GREEN+ programme, Satellogic will “monitor the compliance of signatory jurisdictions to avoid deforestation”.

In February 2022, Satellogic announced a partnership with Palantir Technologies, a US data-mining company co-founded by Peter Thiel.

Palantir is one of the companies that took over the role of the Pentagon’s “Total Information Awareness” programme which was set up after the 9/11 attacks. In a 2003 Q&A document, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes TIA as “based on a vision of pulling together as much information as possible about as many people as possible into an ‘ultra-large-scale’ database, making that information available to government officials, and sorting through it to try to identify terrorists”.

ACLU wrote that TIA “would kill privacy in America” and “harbors a tremendous potential for abuse”. TIA was dismantled in 2003, but the National Security Agency used basically the same system for its Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Private companies, including Palantir, have also taken up the reins. In 2011, ACLU’s Jay Stanley described Palantir as potentially a “true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale”.

Palantir was funded by the Central Intelligence Agencies’ venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. The company built software that would uncover terrorist networks, based on the approach PayPal came up with for Russian cybercriminals.

The partnership between Satellogic and Palantir creates the possibility of generating massive amounts of satellite data, which will be analysed using Planantir’s MetaConstellation and Edge AI. The results will then be available to Satellogic’s government and commercial customers.

The ultimate aim is to link Satellogic’s images with AI technology so that monitoring of carbon can be carried out without human intervention. Using AI technology, carbon credits can be issued (or not) based on Satellogic’s images, Palantir’s data software and AI, certified by Cercarbono, and registered on EcoRegistry’s blockchain.

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1. The briefing is an edited extract of Eric Ross’s 1998 book “The Malthus Factor: Poverty, Politics and Population in Capitalist Development,” published by Zed Books.