A flurry of state and local governments
in the US have enrolled public owned forests
in carbon projects.
At first glance, it looks good.
Big corporations and states working hand
in hand to protect great swaths of forest.
But the truth is, these deals provide little help
in the fight against climate change.
And claims of extra carbon removals are bogus.
These deals that are signed
on public forest, they look good.
They seem good on paper.
They seem like it's a win-win situation for everyone.
When you, you peel back the curtain
there's really nothing there
and it's not achieving what it is supposed to be achieving.
Professor Steven Davis has examined the carbon
credits allocated to public forests in the us.
The forests are working hard to remove carbon
from the atmosphere, but they were doing that
before the contract was signed.
The goal of this is to reduce carbon
and I don't think that's happening in this case.
US forest credits have been snapped up
by companies trying to reach net zero emissions targets.
JP Morgan Chase and company
paid almost a million dollars to preserve forest
in eastern Pennsylvania 40 miles away.
Walt Disney Company has spent hundreds
of thousands to keep the city of Bethlehem
from cutting down forest and across state lines.
In New York, investment, giant BlackRock Inc.
paid thousands to the city of Albany to refrain
from cutting trees around its reservoirs.
But in all of these cases, the land was never threatened.
The trees were already part of well preserved forests.
So there's this threat that,
oh, logging was gonna
triple, or quadruple.
That's just not true.
So for these, credit companies say,
"Oh, you know
we're assuring the future of that, there won't be
rapacious logging".
Is, it's kind of a vague and largely untrue assertion.
To actually make a difference,
carbon offsets have to take more carbon
out of the atmosphere or prevent more emissions
than would otherwise have happened without them.
This is called additionality.
Without it, the credits are not offsetting anything.
If you confront the companies that
sell these credits with that,
they do one of two things.
They go back to their models and they say,
"No, these are really good models.
They've been approved by accreditation agencies,
et cetera."
And that's all true.
But that's not the issue.
The issue isn't the model they use to look
at how much carbon is in the forest.
The issue is whether or not an additional amount
of carbon is being removed because of the exchange
because they sold carbon credits.
And that is not happening.
Carbon credits are a nice earner for states.
It's almost money for nothing.
Credits are sold while forests are managed
in the same way they've always been.
Counties and states.
The public entities that own the forests are making
making some nice revenue streams from this
and it's helping their budgets.
So a typical deal in North Woods County
in Wisconsin is for between one
and $2 million a year for the first couple of years
the way the deal is structured,
and then it drops to a couple hundred thousand
dollars a year.
And this for a small county with a few tens
or hundreds of thousands of people is
is an absolutely incredible source of revenue.
We are announcing the climate pledge.
On the other side of the deal,
Carbon offsets offer companies a cheap and easy way
to buff their green credentials.
Rather than dramatically change their operations,
JP Morgan executives continue to jet around the globe.
Disney's cruise ships still burn oil and BlackRock's
office buildings gobble up electricity.
And although BlackRock says its carbon offsets are just part
of its emissions plans,
and JP Morgan contends
it's seeking to better evaluate carbon credit quality
these companies are reducing nowhere
near the pollution that they claim
In practice, if those carbon offsets don't do that job
they're not reducing their emissions.
So they're moving towards
or they're making claims of carbon neutrality
without actually achieving carbon neutrality.
What that means is there's a false sense of progress.
There's a false sense that we are collectively reducing
or neutralizing our emissions when it's not
in fact the case.
And if forestry offsets are dubious,
they're not alone.
There is mounting skepticism over
whether the whole credits system is effective
in reducing emissions.
Bloomberg's analysis of more
than 215,000 public offsets revealed
that dozens of global brands rely heavily
on the cheapest and most suspect type of offset.
Ones that provide no additional carbon removal.
Another popular form of carbon offset credits
support solar and wind projects.
Once again, it all looks good on paper
but experts consider these offsets largely worthless.
The issue is timing.
Many renewable offsets came into being just as solar
and wind power became the cheapest source
of energy in most countries,
selling offsets as a way to support renewables
doesn't provide any benefit
if it's already cheaper than coal or gas power.
Basically, companies are claiming credit
for something they had no effect on.
But it's not all smoke and mirrors.
This is the orca plant, currently the world's
largest carbon capture in storage facility.
It gets its power from a geothermal plant next door
and the credits it sells are quantifiable.
You know how much carbon is being taken
and you know it's gonna be mineralized
into the bedrock for hundreds of years.
All good stuff.
But carbon capture doesn't come anywhere close
to moving the needle on climate change.
So that the challenge is enormous, right?
Just to put it in perspective.
So globally, we currently emit 40 gigatons of CO2 per year.
That's 40 billion tons.
And depending on which scenario you look at
that we will have to remove six,
eight, 10, maybe 15
maybe even 20 gigatons per year.
Climeworks who operate this site
are working to scale up their plants.
But let's put things in perspective.
This site can remove 4,000 tons a year.
The latest UN report estimates the equivalent
of nearly 53 gigatons
of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere
in 2021 if you include all greenhouse gases.
So the most credible sector of the carbon offset
market has almost no environmental impact.
It's a rounding error.
Thankfully, despite all the bad news
not everyone is pessimistic.
So I actually expected to retire at this time.
I've been working on climate change now
for about two decades, but this market just started growing
in an unprecedented way.
And if you've worked on climate change as long as I have
you've had this feeling over two decades that
there's never been enough finance to tackle climate change
to tackle this climate crisis.
Last year, more than a billion dollars
worth of offsets were sold.
And supporters believe the market could grow 50 fold
by the end of the decade.
That's a huge amount
of money earmarked to fight climate change.
Donna used to work for the US State Department,
where among other duties,
she served as a climate negotiator.
Now she's trying to clean up the carbon offset
market by letting companies know which credits
will make a difference in which are hot air.
And what we find is that there are good carbon projects.
We believe that there are credits out there
that are generating real additional emission reduction
but there are also some that are not.
And again,
I think what we need to see is this market mature.
And I think over time,
if it does, the market can be
in fact a really powerful way to tackle climate change.
I know that the current voluntary market
is far from perfect,
but companies have started thinking about it.
Okay, granted some have probably done it
for marketing reasons, but a lot of the companies
and we think especially the companies we work with
spending several hundred dollars per ton
that's not marketing anymore.
That's being serious.
And that is currently only possible
in the volunteering market.
So that's the good side of it.
The money flowing into the carbon offset market
may not be making a significant difference yet
but supporters like Donna argue that with regulation
and maturity,
that money will make a difference soon.
Voluntary markets are at the heart of it.
Additional action, right?
So companies that are purchasing these credits are going
beyond what they are required to do
legally to tackle climate change.
And clearly governance are not moving fast enough.
We need them to move faster
but we also need to have voluntary action
and we need to scale up voluntary action
in addition to hopefully over time having policies
and measures in place and pricing carbon.
These companies that are getting involved in the market
and that are really driving the scale
that we're seeing today are doing so
because either shareholders are demanding it,
their employees are demanding it,
or they feel the corporate social responsibility to do so.
And I think that's really encouraging.
So I'm hopeful that these markets
can have a positive impact.