I've Been Saying this for How Long?

The University of California is ending its policy of paying for carbon offsets, because they have discovered that ALL of them are fraudulent.

This is why we need a carbon tax rather than cap and trade.  When money gets involved, fraud follows:

In the fall of 2018, the University of California (UC) tasked a team of researchers with identifying tree planting or similar projects from which it could confidently purchase carbon offsets that would reliably cancel out greenhouse gas emissions across its campuses.

The researchers found next to nothing.

“We took a look across the whole market and did deeper dives into project types we thought were more promising,” says Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, housed within UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy, who led the effort. “And we came up almost empty.”

The findings helped prompt the entire university system to radically rethink its sustainability plans. In July, UC announced it would nearly eliminate the use of third-party offsets, charge each of its universities a carbon fee for ongoing pollution, and focus on directly cutting emissions across its campuses and health facilities.

Now the researchers are sharing the lessons they learned over the course of the project, in the hopes of helping other universities and organizations consider what role, if any, offsets should play in sustainability strategies, MIT Technology Review can report. On November 30, they will launch a website highlighting the array of problems they found, the strict standards they helped set for UC’s offset purchases, and the methods they developed for scrutinizing projects in voluntary carbon markets.

Spoiler:  There are no non-corrupt carbon offsets, because the whole structure is criminogenic.

To quote Naked Capitalism, "If fraud can occur, it will already have occurred."

………

Students, faculty, and campus budget officers raised concerns about the institution’s plan to rely on and invest so heavily in such an unreliable climate tool. In response, the UC’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative set up the UC Carbon Abatement Committee, which worked with staff, students, and faculty from each campus to establish the institution’s purchasing standards and to identify the types of projects that could meet them. The initiative also provided funding for a dedicated research effort, led by Haya, exploring these questions.

But finding projects that met even the basic standards of reliability proved so difficult that the researchers ultimately drew a larger lesson from the work, says Camille Kirk, who was previously the director of sustainability at UC Davis and co-directed the research effort along with staff at the UC Office of the President.

“You can’t buy your way out of this,” says Kirk, now head of sustainability at the

J. Paul Getty Trust, one of the world’s richest arts institutions. “Ultimately, it’s just better if you invest in yourself, invest in your infrastructure, and do the direct work on decarbonization.”

The structure and incentives in carbon offsets are even more corrupt, and more corrupting, than those in the cryptocurrency "industry."

Corruption and looting is not a bug, it is a feature of so-called "Market based solutions". to societal problems that actually require government action.

It's the damn Chicago parking meter deal all over again.