Spent some years being a (financial) auditor and the ESG stuff always seemed particularly sketchy. The type of operations where you start with the answer and figure out a way to get the facts to fit
About a decade ago I was at a climate conference at MIT, and talked with someone who said she'd gone to visit several certified carbon projects that turned out to not exist at all.
The article was good and goes into more detail than I expected it would about the particular perverse incentives in this case. But in general, isn't this a problem with all forms of commercial auditing?
Without a truly adversarial process (like, say, the US IRS), where there's a party that is actively incentivized to _find_ problems rather than to _not get caught overlooking_ problems, it is never going to drive quality beyond the bare minimum plausible deniability level.
Carbon credits are one of the biggest scams in our attempts to "clean up". In the same spirit as some industries putting the "recyclable" symbol on everything end everything. "We planted a tree". No you didn't, you paid someone to tell you they planted a tree for you and you don't want to look any close than that.
Companies can keep doing what they do and pay off someone else on the other side of the world for the promise that this third party will do something to compensate for what the company is doing. This is never truly auditable and enforceable, and it doesn't need to be, the point is to have a compliance tick-box that you did your best to clean up your act.
They're just saddling someone else with that "debt", and much like with actual debt, usually it all ends up in a bankruptcy where none of that is ever recovered. Except it's worse with carbon credits where creative accounting is allowed from the start.
Carbon credits are nothing but a scam. Their prices are completely made-up since we don’t have the technology to remove carbon and therefore don’t have the faintest idea what the actual cost should be. It’s nothing but a way of hamstringing our industry to make us poorer.
Carbon credits are a good transition idea on paper but they are so easy to game one can’t stop wonder if they work at all.
My favourite remains digesters being heated by burning non green methane to produce green methane which will be more valuable thanks to the carbon credit. But big oil tells us it’s renewable, pinky swear.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 33.3 ms ] threadWithout a truly adversarial process (like, say, the US IRS), where there's a party that is actively incentivized to _find_ problems rather than to _not get caught overlooking_ problems, it is never going to drive quality beyond the bare minimum plausible deniability level.
Companies can keep doing what they do and pay off someone else on the other side of the world for the promise that this third party will do something to compensate for what the company is doing. This is never truly auditable and enforceable, and it doesn't need to be, the point is to have a compliance tick-box that you did your best to clean up your act.
They're just saddling someone else with that "debt", and much like with actual debt, usually it all ends up in a bankruptcy where none of that is ever recovered. Except it's worse with carbon credits where creative accounting is allowed from the start.
Just like the oil car that goes back and forth between the USA and Canada and somehow makes an investor money (duty drawback or “shuttle trade”).
My favourite remains digesters being heated by burning non green methane to produce green methane which will be more valuable thanks to the carbon credit. But big oil tells us it’s renewable, pinky swear.