It's very important given the nature
of the climate crisis right now for the general public
to have an understanding of what progress is
or is not actually happening.
And I think many readers right now
they'll see these hundreds and hundreds of companies
making these big, bold climate claims.
And they would be forgiven to think that,
we're well on our way to meeting
the emission reduction trajectory we need to be on
and the reality of the matter is
we're just not on that trajectory.
And a key reason for this sort of disconnect
is the use of offsets that aren't doing
what they claim to be doing.
We have a massive potential for sort of willful blindness.
We can convince ourselves of things
regardless of what the facts are.
And so that's what tends to happen in these cases.
It's not that anybody is setting out
to commit climate fraud.
They of walk themselves into a situation
and they convince themselves of one thing
and that allows them to convince themselves
of another thing.
But at the end of the day they're doing something
that makes no sense at all.
My name is Ben Elgin.
I wrote the story about how the billion dollar market
for carbon offsets is setting back
the fight against climate change.
So one of the challenges in reporting on carbon offsets
and trying to figure out what's going on
is really finding good experts
who have been steeped in this marketplace
and are willing to candidly talk about it.
One of the best people
for this is a fellow named Mark Trexler
and I've been talking to him for more than a decade.
My name is Mark Trexler.
I've worked in climate change for the last 30 years.
I was actually hired by
the World Resources Institute in Washington
to work on the first carbon offset project in 1988.
In terms of defining a carbon offset
one of the beauties so to speak of greenhouse gases,
sort of the silver lining of greenhouse gases.
When you put up a molecule of CO2 into the atmosphere
it can be anywhere in the planet in seven days.
And therefore, if there's an option to reduce emissions
on the other side of the planet
and you can do that very cheaply
as compared to doing it in your factory for example,
then why not pay that person, that factory
on the other side of the planet to reduce their emissions
then you are in a sense offsetting your emissions
and the atmosphere doesn't
really see your emissions anymore.
So carbon offsets have been around for quite some time
and there were actually key
with these international climate agreements
such as the Kyoto Protocol, which mandated
the wealthiest countries reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions.
The treaty was signed
on the 11th of December, 1997.
Decided.
The business community in general saw carbon offsets
as a huge opportunity to comply with whatever policies
and measures might be coming down the pike
on climate change, much more cost-effectively.
We've seen a huge surge
in companies making big proclamations
about how they're going carbon neutral
or zeroing out all of their carbon emissions.
We're going to reduce
our carbon footprint to net zero.
Unilever is committing to net zero emissions.
We can achieve a net zero emissions world.
We began looking at these corporate claims
of have dramatically reduced emissions.
And we noticed so many of these companies
were using carbon offsets to achieve these aims.
And as we began to look
at the carbon offset projects themselves,
what we found is that the environmental benefits claimed
by these companies are not actually what they seem to be.
And as we sort of saw and spotted a number
of these very aggressive carbon offset projects
which appeared to be generating inflated credits
or bogus credits, we saw a number of them
were associated with The Nature Conservancy.
And this surprised us.
The Nature Conservancy is the world's
biggest environmental group.
They have about a billion dollars a year in revenues
and they've been around for seven decades.
They've preserved about 125 million acres of land.
And they've done so many good works over the years.
And they've been very strong
in terms of working with corporate partners.
The Nature Conservancy has taken a different approach,
a very pragmatic and pro-business approach.
They will not go out and criticize a big polluter
but they're very happy to work with them.
Some might say that well that's selling out
but others would say,
and those at The Nature Conservancy would say,
these companies have deep pockets,
they can help fund important preservation work
and we have absolutely no problem working
with them on this stuff.
So companies are very warm and they've partnered
with The Nature Conservancy for many years.
And yeah, it definitely lends a sheen
of credibility to these projects.
Here are 20 reasons
to visit the Disney World this year.
One, two, three,
four, five, six, seven.
If you look at for instance Disney
that's a sprawling company with theme parks
and cruise lines that burn up diesel fuel.
They have office buildings
and television studios that consume electricity.
So these companies are trying to make major,
major reductions in their carbon footprint,
but it's very difficult to change
these fundamental ways their businesses operate.
So Disney has been a big buyer
of carbon offsets that are orchestrated
by The Nature Conservancy.
One of the projects that they buy
from is called Pennsylvania Ridges
and that's a plot of land,
most of the land is actually about a three-hour
drive outside of Philadelphia.
Interestingly, this land, 3000 of these acres
was actually acquired
by The Nature Conservancy in the late 1990s.
This land was imminently threatened.
There was a pending logging contract on this land.
So they do what they've done so well
for all of these years, which is they go out,
they raise money from local philanthropists
and they go buy this land to protect it
from developers and loggers.
And at the time, according to an archived version
of The Nature Conservancy's website,
when they were proudly announcing this deal, they said,
these threats have been abated because of this acquisition
by The Nature Conservancy.
So it's really interesting now, fast forward two decades
to earlier this year
when they put forward this carbon project.
And if you look through it, this land
is a key part of that carbon project.
And what they're now saying is this land
is now once again imminently threatened,
72% of the trees are gonna be cut within five years.
Now this is just astounding because this land
is owned by The Nature Conservancy.
They do not clear-cut land that they've bought
through philanthropic donations.
So this scenario that they've put forward
to get carbon revenues is not really plausible.
And what that means is when you have Disney coming in
and buying these credits, when it eventually lowers
its carbon footprint, because of these credits,
well that won't be a credible or truthful claim by Disney.
So this is an organization that truly understands
the threat of the issue of climate change
and is wanting to do its part to address this.
However in this situation it just appears
their drive which they've had for decades
to increase the amount of revenues that it can use
for land preservation work.
Nature Conservancy and many others see that carbon credits
as a pot of money that they can tap into
to further their own benevolent aims.
But unfortunately what this has resulted in is claims
of climate progress that just aren't really happening.
So The Nature Conservancy defends vigorously
these deals and they and others will say, look,
our projects are just following the rules
that these registry set up.
So some would also put some of the blame
on the registries themselves
because they're setting up the rules
which allow these vapid projects to get up and sold.
So we've reached out to all of the companies
we mentioned in this story, including Disney,
they didn't want to be interviewed for this story
but they all told us that, look,
we have to rely on the experts out there.
And those experts they say are these carbon registries
that have been set up.
Most of these nature Conservancy deals
are set up and sold on this exchange,
it's called the American Carbon Registry.
Now it's the oldest of these registries
that allow voluntary carbon credits to be sold.
They've been around since 1996.
What these offset registries do is they set up rules
and any carbon offset project has to follow those rules,
but there's this tension that's always there.
If the rules are too strict, then it's gonna be very hard
for carbon offset projects to get up and running.
So there's this balance going on
where the registries want rules that attract projects
but they don't want it to be so strict
where it will disincentivize projects from getting listed.
One of the challenges with designing carbon offset systems
is that there are normally two people at the table.
You have buyers and you have sellers.
And to some extent you have policymakers,
but the buyers and the sellers are really the ones
with the expertise, with the incentive
to really participate hard,
make a lot of things happen.
And the challenge there is,
is that both of them sort of want the same thing
or they're both happy with the same thing.
They're happy with low cost offsets and a lot of them,
because that works for their business model.
You end up though with nobody really representing
the atmosphere, so to speak,
nobody's really representing the climate
in those discussions.
And so the policies end up biasing the whole system
and you end up in sort of a race to the bottom,
and that's what we've seen happen.
When it comes specifically to the topic of carbon offsets,
I am a fan of carbon offsets
in the sense that they can help mitigate climate change,
they absolutely can,
but if we're not going to do it correctly
in a way that actually does help mitigate climate change,
then it's nothing but a distraction.
And after 30 years you have to start wondering,
is it really just a distraction?
And that's really unfortunate that that's where we are.
Ultimately what needs to happen is systemic change.
We're sort of nibbling around the edges
with some of these different things.
We need change how we produce energy.
We need to change how we transport ourselves.
We need to change what and how we eat.
We need systemic change associated
with transitioning to a low carbon economy.
A lot of what we're doing today
is not promoting systemic change,
it's sort of trying to stick your thumb in the dyke
to preserve the current system.
And at the end of the day that can't really work.