Greenwishing and Greenwashing: Carbon credits and carbon markets are fraught with moral hazards and legal exposure.
Until carbon emissions can be measured and verified, carbon credits are meaningless
Greenwishing and Greenwashing: Carbon credits and carbon markets are fraught with moral hazards and legal exposure.
Until carbon emissions can be measured and verified, carbon credits are meaningless.
✍️ By Joe Lo and Matteo Civillini
Stories of big polluters hiding their climate credentials behind dodgy carbon credits are nothing new.
They usually go like this: company X buys offsets, experts say they’re junk, company X replies ‘hey, this top certifier assures us they are great’. Rinse and repeat.
This week we’ve written about something worse. On January 9, Shell quietly used over a million offsets despite knowing that the certifier doubts them.
We know they know because:
A) Their certifier Verra suspended and is investigating the projects
B) We wrote about that (and exchanged emails with Shell) last year
C) Because Shell themselves took the projects off their website “pending Verra’s review”
And Shell wasn’t just the buyer. It was an agent for the projects, looking to sell them on for a profit.
Last year, they told us they would “look carefully” at the results of Verra’s investigation.Those results are nowhere to be seen.
But Shell had no qualms about claiming those offsets helped it cancel out emissions equivalent to three gas-fired power plants running for a year.
Going forward, Verra are drawing up a new and hopefully improved methodology for these kind of credits.
But who have they asked for advice on that new methodology? A company owned by Shell.
Well much like measuring weather, when it comes to "climate-change" nothing can be verified accurately. Generally these credits on built upon an initial set of assumption that continues into perpetually with no follow up, no governance, & or oversight. Not hard to see what happens all upfront benefits and no lost.