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Our naked green emperors just lost one of their fig leaves.
This is a big story that will probably fly under the radar. That’s too bad because it gets at the underlying scammy nature of the climate change movement.
Every time a state government or a corporation announces a particular environmental target, most of the time what they mean is that they’re going to make some small changes and then they’ll buy some offsets or credits to compensate for the rest.
For example, makers of actual cars were forced to buy credits from Tesla by California so that working-class drivers were financing luxury car owners. Airlines now routinely announce that they’re buying offsets which means a portion of your ticket is going to pay off some company that is supposedly doing some environmentally sound. Your power company buys credits resold by some company that’s supposedly running wind farms in Wyoming (that nobody needs) which doesn’t mean that you’re using wind power, but that you’re paying for someone else to use wind power to atone for your use of fossil fuels.
Obviously, this is already a scam. And the few sincere environmentalists who believe the sky is actually falling denounce it as such. But it’s an incredibly lucrative scam that moves billions if not trillions of dollars around.
Here’s a nuts and bolts look at what happens when it turns out that the commodity, environmental virtue, being sold may not even exist.
Renat Heuberger gathered his co-founders on a glacier in the Swiss Alps for a celebration. The half-dozen men behind South Pole, the world’s leading seller of carbon offsets, raised their beers around a crackling fire: Business was booming and the Zurich firm’s valuation was hurtling toward $1 billion, making it one of the first “carbon unicorns.”…
The company’s biggest moneymaker is a mega-project in Zimbabwe called Kariba, which South Pole claimed has prevented the annihilation of a forest nearly the size of Puerto Rico. That’s South Pole’s business model: help finance projects that can credibly counteract rising levels of greenhouse gas, such as by stopping deforestation, and then sell the resulting credit to corporate clients who want to compensate for their own planet-warming pollution…