REDDisms: March 2026
This is the fifth in REDD-Monitor’s occasional series of REDDisms. Each post consists of ten quotations, nine of which are recent and one of which comes from my collection of REDDisms dating back to 2009.
“REDD: It’s a bit like . . . Your house is now an important carbon sink and has been used to justify 200 Australians driving to the mall. Don’t worry, follow these rules and we’ll still let you live here . . . for now.”
Danny Chivers, New Internationalist, February 2009
“These institutions signed up without having any clue what they were signing up for. They were joining the herd and wanted to look good, but they never had any inclination to change their business model.”
Patrick McCully, analyst at Reclaim Finance, January 2026
“The EU imported some 2 billion of those CDM credits, roughly 150% of the 2024 ETS total volume, because we were strong believers in the multilateral regime. But that regime was badly implemented and fraud occurred frequently, like when countries produced and then burned F-gases to create credits.”
Jos Delbeke, European University Institute, Febuary 2026
“Guyana is not a side story to that portfolio, Guyana is a cornerstone to our portfolio. The Stabroek block combines world-class geology with competitive development costs, repeatable project execution and an opportunity to create value at very significant scale.”
Dan Ammann, ExxonMobil, February 2026
“Challenges such as climate change are forcing communities to change their relationship with the land, often through capitalist mechanisms such as financing for biodiversity or carbon credits, which are alienating land from communities.”
Kariuki Kirigia, University of Toronto, February 2026
“Currently available carbon credits often fail to deliver the climate benefits they promise. This “effectiveness gap” creates legal risk wherever carbon credits are presented as equivalent to genuine GHG emission reductions or removals.”
Clemens Kaupa, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, March 2026
“There is now a large amount of scientific literature, spanning at least two decades, that shows most carbon offset projects and the credits they generate lack integrity, meaning they do not represent real, additional, and/or permanent abatement. The consistency of the findings points to systemic problems, with both the design and administration of offset schemes.”
Andrew Macintosh, Australian National University, March 2026
“Before the Iran conflict, a third of the world’s seaborne trade in fertiliser flowed through the Strait of Hormuz. Many farmers in Britain are ill-prepared to pay more for fertiliser because extreme weather made last year’s harvest the second-worst on record.”
Ben Cooke, The Times, March 2026
“We don’t have a food scarcity problem — we have a cropland use problem. Nearly 40% of all calories produced were used as feed for livestock, which yield far fewer calories for human consumption. Beef cattle in particular are inefficient in converting feed to human food, consuming one-third of feed calories but only providing 9% of the food calories we get from livestock. Shifting cropland now used to grow feed to produce food for people instead could dramatically reduce the harmful impacts of agriculture on climate, water resources and wildlife habitat.”
Paul West, Ph.D., Project Drawdown, March 2026
“Strikingly, the Amazon is partially losing its ability to act as a carbon sink. Parts of the Brazilian Amazon have become net carbon sources, emitting an estimated 0.22 billion tonnes of carbon per year . Southeast Asia’s forests crossed that threshold earlier, becoming net carbon emitters during the 2000s and 2010s due to extensive deforestation and peat fires.
“The Congo Basin remains the last major tropical forest system that still absorbs substantially more carbon than it releases, estimated at approximately 600 million tonnes of CO2 annually. “But emerging evidence suggests this may be changing.”
CIFOR, March 2026
John Palmer sent the following comment by email:
Re the quote from ExxonMobil about Guyana:
1. No question that ExxonMobil has excellent geologists, seismic surveyors, oilfield engineering, project management, communication skills, resulting in very low oilfield break-even costs.
2. Enjoys the world’s most lop-sided Production Sharing Agreement.
3. Enjoys absence of ring-fencing of costs per oilfield.
4. Pays almost no local taxes but receives from government certificates to say that taxes have been paid by government on behalf of Exxon.
5. Has grossly inadequate insurance cover and refuses to provide an unlimited parent company guarantee (a one-page letter).
6. Consistently exceeds the safe working limits for extraction rates declared in the EIAs, by up to 30% so far, so invalidating even the small insurance.
7. Refuses to pay even nominal penalty for environmental pollution.
8. Government has no independent monitoring of oilfield extraction rates or flaring of gas, depends entirely on what Exxon provides as data.
9. Publishes no reports to show that it is complying with legally-required environmental monitoring.
10. Is supported by government when faced by legal challenges from citizens of Guyana. [however, Exxon is now required by a High Court judgment to estimate Scope 3 GHG emissions in EIAs, and its contractor for EIAs (Acorn International) has done so in the latest Longtail oilfield EIA].
11. Holds country-wide ‘consultations’ on the contracted-out environmental impact assessments, is unable or unwilling to answer questions from the audience at these sessions, promises ‘we will get back to you on your question’ but never does.