The Great Climate Scandal. Part 1: Carbon footprints, mega corporations, magical tokens, and a “much darker world”

Channel 4's great new documentary on the world of carbon offsets

A new Channel 4 documentary takes a look at the problems with the carbon offsetting industry and tries (without success) to get some answers from carbon certifying company Verra.

The documentary is part of Channel 4’s Change Climate Season:

Journalist Matt Shea presents the programme. He says that all the Big Polluters these days are telling us that they are reducing their emissions to “net zero”. Which brings us straight to offsets:

It it turns out many of these mega corporations aren’t reducing their greenhouse gas emissions as much as they say they are. Many of their net zero plans include something called carbon offsetting.

Offsetting projects often involve planting or protecting a forest somewhere and saying that the carbon suck up by those trees cancels out all the pollution that you spewed out into the air somewhere else.

US$153 to offset Shea’s carbon footprint

Shea goes onto Conservation International’s website to calculate his carbon footprint. He’s already pointed out that the whole idea of carbon footprints was created by a PR agency working for a major oil company. (The year was 2004. The PR company was Ogilvy & Mather. And the oil company was BP.)

After answering a few questions on the Conservation International website about how he lives, what he eats and how often he travels, Shea finds he can offset one year of his emissions for US$153.

“The idea is if I pay this organisation to save a rainforest somewhere that then makes it fine to fly all around the world and live an amazing life. US$153, done. I’m absolved of all my sins.

“If it was that simple then why are emissions even a problem?”

Shea starts looking into the “carbon footprint offset trend”. He says, “It looks like almost every company you can think of is doing it now: Shell, Disney, Microsoft, Deliveroo, Chanel, Amazon.”

He notes that all these companies have bought carbon offsets, although many are “cooling on the idea, after some damning journalistic exposés.”

Shea asks,

“If our entire future is in the hands of this carbon offsetting scheme, how do we know that it actually works?”

“Carbon offsets are magical tokens”

Shea meets up with Patrick Greenfield, an environmental journalist with The Guardian. In January 2023, he was part of an investigation into offsetting, working together with Die Zeit and SourceMaterial. They found that 94% of offsets certified by Verra had no benefit to the climate.

Here’s how Shea’s conversation with Greenfield went:

Shea: What is a carbon offset, and are they any good?

Greenfield: Very simply carbon offsets are magical tokens that you can buy to cancel out your emissions. These these carbon credits are meant to represent one ton of carbon that’s either been removed from the atmosphere, or is an avoided emission. To answer if they’re any good or not that’s complicated. A lot are very bad.

Shea: I read in one of your articles it said that 90% of rainforest carbon offsetting is basically . . . Is that true?

I don’t know what Shea actually said after the word “basically”. I assume it was something like “bullshit”, but the sound track goes silent. While he’s speaking the following text appears on the screen, from Greenfield’s January 2023 Guardian article:

The conversation continues:

Greenfield: So the biggest companies in the world often want to protect particular areas of rainforest. They can point to an area and say, “We have kept that standing.” And it turns out actually many of these schemes are not stopping any deforestation at all, or stopping very small amounts.

Shea: So how are they allowed to do this?

Greenfield: Companies when they’re looking for these credits, when they’re looking for good ones, seek out ones approved by Gold Standard or Verra. Verra are the biggest, they are a non-profit based in Washington.

Shea: So this organisation Verra what’s your view on them?

Greenfield: They are the the guardians and they’re there to safeguard the integrity of the system. They say what’s real and what isn’t. We need to trust them. They need to be using the best possible science.

Net Zero is simple. We need to be in balance with the world in terms of carbon emissions, right, what we’re putting out needs to balance with what’s being sucked back in. And that’s what we absolutely need to be correct about for this entire thing to work.

Shea: To survive.

Greenfield: And to survive, yeah. The future of humanity relies on it. I mean this market is, as I said, it’s totally unregulated. And a lot of people have become very wealthy. I think off hot air, in some cases, right, it appears.

It’s great that Greenfield is explaining this. But none of this should come as any surprise to anyone who has been following REDD and carbon markets for any length of time. It was all fairly accurately predicted back in 2009, by Marc Stuart, the co-founder of the carbon offsetting firm Ecosecurities.

Stuart wrote that REDD is,

the most mind twistingly complex endeavor in the carbon game. The fact is that REDD involves scientific uncertainties, technical challenges, heterogeneous non-contiguous asset classes, multi-decade performance guarantees, local land tenure issues, brutal potential for gaming and the fact that getting it wrong means that scam artists will get unimaginably rich while emissions don’t change a bit.

“A much darker world”

The conversation between Shea and Greenfield took a slightly surprising turn when Greenfield talks about a this being a “much darker world”.

Greenfield: There’s actually, like this is a much darker world than

Shea: What?

Greenfield: Yeah, crazy. I didn’t realise. Like there was a really strong push back from people in the carbon offsetting world.

Shea: What do you mean by a strong push back?

Greenfield: What do I mean by a strong push back?

No, er, I think, is it OK if I don’t?

Greenfield turns to the camera, and it is switched off.

When Greenfield mentioned the “darker world” of offsets, I was hoping he would perhaps talk about what he found when he visited the Alto Mayo REDD project in Peru as part of the investigation he worked on with Die Zeit and SourceMaterial.

Conservation International runs the project, and is selling offsets from the project on its carbon footprint website. Disney is one of the major buyers of offsets from the project.

When Greenfield visited the project several villagers told him that their homes had been destroyed to make way for the REDD project:

The project also used a massively exaggerated baseline - that’s the story about how much deforestation would have happened in the absence of the project. As a result, the project has generated millions of fake carbon offsets.

Shockingly, Verra describes this project as a “good example” and claims that it provides “a lifeline to communities”.

Carbon offsetting events

Greenfield told Shea about a couple of upcoming carbon offsetting events where all the big players would be attending. The first was the “Corporate Investments in Forestry and Biodiversity” and it took place on 4-5 October 2023, in London.

The organisers, CE Events & Media, had previously disinvited Greenfield from one of their events. The organisers told Greenfield that,

We’ve had a number of concerning conversations with I’d say about 20-30% of our speakers and sponsors and if such a large number of them are uncomfortable with you being in the room we have no other choice but to rescind your invitation.

“It’s always a bad idea to disinvite a journalist from your event, because it just makes it look as if you’re hiding something,” Shea says.

The other event was the Carbon Forward Conference 2023, which took place on 11-13 October 2023, in London. This event was organised by Redshaw Advisors, a carbon consulting firm, and Carbon Pulse, a subscription based news service about carbon markets.

Before visiting these events, Shea and his team did some research into the world of carbon offsets. Predictably enough, they found widespread problems.

The next post in the series about this documentary will be about these problems, followed by a look at what happened when Shea turned up at the carbon offsetting events in London.

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