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…
Yet according to several outside experts and South Pole’s own analysis, the firm and its partner ended up vastly overestimating the extent of the preservation by Kariba. As a result, Gucci, Nestle, McKinsey and other South Pole clients have — unwittingly — overstated their own progress in combating climate change, because the Kariba credits they bought haven’t generated enough real atmospheric benefit…
Most of Kariba’s €100 million in proceeds have gone to South Pole and its project partner, a company called Carbon Green Investments, not — as both companies previously indicated in interviews and public blog posts — to people in the rural communities who do the work of fighting deforestation.
My response to this is much like my response to FTX. Can it be a scam when the entire industry is a scam? Crypto, carbon offsets, are all basically peddling an imaginary commodity as a currency. Does it matter how imaginary it is when its value is wholly artificial and not backed by anything? Except, in the case of carbon offsets, government and bank mandates.
“No one who buys a five-kilo pack of potatoes at the supermarket wants to end up only having one kilo,” said Jürg Füssler, a carbon market veteran who heads up environmental work at INFRAS, a research and consulting firm in Zurich, speaking broadly about the industry. “That’s what’s happening now. The basic market confidence is shattered.”
But the market is inherently worthless. If you believe that the planet is about to die because people are flying jet planes, then paying someone else to protect trees isn’t a serious answer.
That’s why people laugh when John Kerry or Bill Gates protest that they have to fly private jets but it’s okay because they’re buying carbon offsets.
The Microsoft co-founder grew visibly irritated when confronted on the topic during a lengthy interview last week with BBC journalist Amol Rajan.
“What do you say to the charge that if you are a climate change campaigner, but you also travel around the world in a private jet, you’re a hypocrite?” Rajan asked.
“By the gold standard of funding Climeworks to do direct air capture that far exceeds my family’s carbon footprint, and I spend billions of dollars on climate innovation. So, you know, should I stay at home and not come to Kenya and learn about farming and malaria?” an annoyed Gates responded.
“Anyway, I’m comfortable with the idea that not only am I not part of the problem by paying for the offsets, but also through the billions that my breakthrough energy group is spending, that I’m part of the solution,” Gates added.
Our naked green emperors just lost one of their fig leaves.
Tex the Mockingbird says
First they sell Carbon Offsets then they sell Snake Oil then they sell a Bridge
Jeff Bargholz says
I hope they keep their fig leaves on. I don’t want to see those little dingus’s.
valyria starstorm says
We need to quit giving them fig leaves and give them poison oak or poison ivy leaves instead.
Jeff Bargholz says
Or poison sumak. That’s the worst.
I’ve had hives from poison oak and ivy. The oak was far worse. The ivy didn’t even bother me but the oak itched like a mofo.
J West says
Nothing is ever what it seems,
Algorithmic Analyst says
Thanks, good analysis of the scam.
TruthLaser says
Carbon offsets are the new dispensations.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Yes, that’s an excellent historical analogy.
VOWG says
Yes, the word indulgences comes to mind.
Spurwing Plover says
Its spring Time but its still Cold out there we had snow flurries this afternoon the Whie Stuff we were suppose to never have again because if Global Warming/Climate Change
Jeff Bargholz says
It’s been raining off and on here in San Jose for months. Drought. my ass.
Every year the government claims CA is in a drought and it’s a lie every time. The Sierras ALWAYS snow and produce water. This year the snow was near record levels.
Kynarion Hellenis says
Recapture is strenuously avoided. Another manufactured crisis that will not be wasted.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Exactly. Thanks KH
Lethal says
During the COVID ‘epidemic’ billions of plastic syringes and needles with plastic bases were used and then thrown away as they cannot be sterilized for reusing. What a waste! All that plastic going to landfill for an epidemic that didn’t exist! And to think the powers that be wants all plastic done away with to save the planet! the world is run by idiots.
JustSayNo says
Not to mention mountains of those disgusting masks clogging up landfills, floating in the ocean and entangling wildlife. The scamdemic was hard on everyone. Unfortunately, I don’t think that was the last of it. Once the totalitarians get a taste of power, their lust is excited and becomes nearly insatiable.
World@70 says
I wonder how much of this scam are turned into Chinese Yuan and Biden Bucks?
Noah Andeark says
Bill Gates also puts a lot of money to stop human sex trafficking, so he’s allowed to rape girls on Epstein’s island. Don’t you plebes get it? He’s just better than you.
Ugly Sid says
Four decades ago in Miami I encountered a clever engineer who informed me that he’d devised a method to power automobiles with the air that rushed by as one drove.
He assured me the only obstacle to producing functioning prototypes was sufficient seed money from visionary investors.
LC says
Reminds me of a comment I made decades ago …
I had a bicycle that I had put a speedometer on – really wanted it for the odometer to know how far I biked. A neighbor, who I knew to be a liberal environmentalist asked me how fast I went. I responded that this bicycle was natural gas powered – so I can only go as fast as I can farrrt.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Thanks Sid 🙂
Perpetual motion schemes, seen a lot of those. People keep falling for them 🙂
Algorithmic Analyst says
My flash of insight just now was, the Green Scam is one of the biggest scams and delusions in history.
I’ve been arguing for a long time that from a macroeconomic point of view oil and such sources of energy are currently indispensable for the world economy, simply because it is so large and the demand for energy from billions of people is too large.
There is also the very old argument that if there was truly an economical alternative the private sector would supply it at the right time, rather than have colossally inefficient governments dictate. My reading from last night confirmed my hypothesis that it was the colossally chaotic and inefficient democratic system in Britain that wrecked the British Empire.
Luonne Dumak says
Very well stated. I thought they couldn’t do anything dumber when they decided it would good to put corn in our gas tanks. Then they came up global warming, global cooling and then climate change. We have to many over educated idtiots with much time on their hands.
Mo de Profit says
That sums it all up, these over educated idiots think they need to fix climate change (an impossible task) and their inevitable conclusion is that there’s too many people on the planet.
Welcome to the UN Agenda 2030
Algorithmic Analyst says
Thanks Mo! That gave me a new flash of insight, into the vast complexity of the climate.
R Cathers says
In the 1970’s an ice age would be upon us by 1990. It never happened in fact it was now getting warmer as pre the scientists. Everyone should have realized man-made climate change was a fraud.
KBigg says
It’s an even bigger scam because no one talks about the CCP — who have built hundreds of polluting coal and oil-fired plants WITH NO SCRUBBERS on them. China plans to build dozens more. But no one talks about this, no one even mentions it. China’s emissions are 4X those of the US and India. The entire industry is run by grifters.
Algorithmic Analyst says
Thanks, that’s one of my pet complaints, no scrubbers. All this over-the-top Green nonsense, but they refuse to look at practical solutions, like scrubbers.
CowboyUp says
Bill has to fly all the way to Africa to learn about farming and malaria? BS.
Jim1937 says
If we are going to die because the world will end in a few years (according to AOC and the gang), why are we worrying about this and not enjoying our last day? Climate freaks are full of crap!
Jim1937 says
If, as AOC and the climate freaks say, the world will end because of climate change, why don’t we just enjoy our remaining days? These people are full of s***!
JaiSeli says
LOL. Carbon is one of THE essential elements to ALL organic life. More CO2 = more plant life which then “exhales” what?
Sodbuster says
A corn ethanol plant pumping the captured CO2 as a result of its manufacture into a pipeline traveling across the same Keystone states enrroute to being pumped into the ground. Hard to find a better scam !
Mick Russom says
how anyone ever paid these deep state / word economic forum climate offset scam to fleece people of money is beyond me
the west is totally demoralized and ideologically subverted and most people are under a mass formation psychosis.
thebeerczar says
Climate change is real. Studies indicate that the climate changes four times a year; Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn. I also have some gently used carbon credits for sale if anyone is interested.
rick says
“Our naked green emperors just lost one of their fig leaves”
Come on Daniel, why would you leave me with that type of picture in my mind?
Al Gore, George Soros, John Kerry with no fig leaves. Oh the humanity
david russell says
The very idea is a scam and was from the Get-go.
Rob Hayden says
In SoCal, to save water they pay homeowners to remove all the green plants in their yards and plant cactus.
To offset one’s carbon footprint, you pay to plant trees, which of course need water.
Catch-22?