Some questions for Andrew Gilmour, CEO of Laconic Infrastructure Partners Inc.
About Bolivia’s US$1.2 billion forest carbon false solution.
Ten days ago, REDD-Monitor wrote about a plan by the Bolivian government to sell US$1.2 billion carbon credits. A company called Laconic Infrastructure Partners Inc. is “assisting” with the forest carbon deal, Reuters reported when the deal was announced in November 2024.
Few concrete details about the proposed forest carbon programme are available. Laconic has never previously run anything like this. Andrew Gilmour’s background is in prisons and security firms.
Apparently, the carbon credits will comply with Article 6, the carbon trading part of the Paris Agreement.
Laconic has signed a “multi-year, seven-figure deal” with Planet labs, a satellite data company to monitor the rate of deforestation in Bolivia.
Bolivia will retain “flexibility” to use the money from the sale of the carbon credits to protect the country’s forests. But exactly what this forest protection will involve is not (yet) publicly available. Neither are any details about whether a process of free, prior and informed consent has been attempted in the country before signing this deal.
Under the deal, Laconic will create 40 million sovereign carbon securities. The money from the sale of these securities will be held in the offshore tax and secrecy haven of the Cayman Islands.
On 16 April 2025, REDD-Monitor wrote to Laconic’s CEO, Andrew Gilmour, with some questions about his company’s involvement in Bolivia’s false solution to address the climate crisis. I also gave him the opportunity to respond to the post on REDD-Monitor.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Laconic has not listed REDD-Monitor’s post in the “Latest News” section of its website:
Here are the questions for Gilmour, to which he has (so far) not responded. REDD-Monitor looks forward to posting his response in full and unedited in due course.
In November 2024, the Bolivian government announced a US$5 billion deal to sell “sovereign carbon credits”. By April 2025, this has been reduced to US$1.2 billion. The number of securitised carbon credits has been reduced from 250 million down to 40 million. Why have these numbers been so dramatically reduced?
Meanwhile, the price of the securitised carbon credits has gone up from US$20 to US$30. Nature based carbon credits are currently trading on the voluntary carbon markets at US$0.35. Why do you anticipate a price almost 90 times the current price?
Inside Climate News reports that the sale of carbon credits will take place in May 2025. Is there an exact date for the launch of the biggest ever sale of carbon credits? If not why not?
What mechanism do you anticipate that the Bolivian government will use to reduce deforestation in the country? Particularly given that deforestation has increased dramatically in recent years and last year more than 10 million hectares was burned by wildfires?
This is Laconic Infrastructure Partners’ first carbon deal. Your background is in prisons and security firms. Yet you describe yourself on LinkedIn as a “global leader in carbon markets”. Why?
In your TEDx talk, you say that we have to remove 500 billion tons of CO₂ from the atmosphere in the next 25 years. That’s 20 billion tons a year. You say this is US$1 trillion of carbon credits each year — your price has now gone up to US$50 per credit. Can you please explain where you get these numbers from.
Selling 20 billion carbon credits per year means allowing 20 billion tons of emissions from burning fossil fuels, because for every seller of carbon credits (who hopefully removed carbon from the atmosphere) there is a buyer who uses the credits to continue polluting. What do you imagine will be the impact of this 20 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions on the climate — and on the forests of Bolivia?
When fossil fuels are burned, the CO₂ remains in the atmosphere for a very long time. A recent paper in Nature found that, “A CO₂ storage period of less than 1,000 years is insufficient for neutralising remaining fossil CO₂ emissions.” Your project with Bolivia runs for five years. How do you propose guaranteeing that Bolivia continues to store carbon in its forests for the next 1,000 years?
What happens if Bolivia’s forests go up in smoke after your five-year-long project?
How did you chose Entoro Capital, LLC as the placement agent for the deal with Bolivia? What due diligence did you carry out on this company?
Why did you chose to incorporate Laconic in the tax haven of Delaware
According to Inside Climate News Laconic will hold the money from the sales of sovereign carbon securities in a special purpose vehicle in the Cayman Islands. Why did you chose this offshore tax and secrecy haven to stash the money?
Laconic claims that Sovereign Carbon is the only product that is compliant with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement because it is “netted against the NDC obligations of all Paris signatories”. Could you please explain this statement further? Is the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, for example, not compliant? Or Verra? Or LEAF? Or ART-TREES?
Neither Laconic nor Bolivia have provided any concrete details about the US$1.2 billion deal. Why not? And when do you propose to do so?
Was a process of free, prior and informed consent carried out with the Indigenous peoples who live in Bolivia’s forests before the announcement of the US$5 billion carbon deal in November 2024? If so, please describe how this process was carried out over the entire country? When did it start? And if not, why not?
How does Laconic propose to address the issue of leakage, i.e. if Bolivia succeeds in stopping deforestation, how do you prevent the deforestation simply moving to neighbouring countries?
Good questions! I'm doing research about the political ecology and climate justice aspects of the forest fires in Bolivia at the moment and I just spend two weeks with an Indigenous community. I can assure you there was no process of free, prior and informed consent. In fact, the concept of carbon credits is mostly unbeknown to the communities living here that lost 80% of their lands because of last year's devastating fires.
Aye, there's the rub - your question #7 - if only carbon credits could pay for removal of that tonne of CO2 without being used as an "offset" to allow yet another tonne to be released. But as with other forms of carbon taxation, you can't balance that set of books, the liability side remains as a debt unresolved while this paradox does not exist in oxygen pricing. And with question #15, nobody can ever properly resolve the FPIC issue since they will not convey to the Indigenous Peoples the actual effects of the long-term loss of their land rights. The net result is it moves the people away from their own version of sovereign natural wealth into a condition of being money vassals and these projects always put a low value on this deceptive change. In natural wealth, poverty does not exists until corrupted by money. That must be explained in FIPC.