Gee, What a Shame 🤣

Not generally a fan of the Trump administration's actions with regard to anthropogenic climate change, but as I have noted before, I am not a fan of carbon credits, which I see as an inherently corrupt system.

Frequently, as is most the egregiously the case with The Nature Conservancy  these credits involve the sale of, "Credits," derived from activities that already would have happened.  (The Nature Conservancy sells carbon credit for properties that they had already declared will never be logged)

Another case is credits to EV manufacturers, who would have tried to sell the same cars with or without carbon credits.

So we have a case where bad politics, their being pro-pollution, results in good policy, 

That is a bit of brightness in the dark, but this is not what I find amusing.

What I find amusing is that the 2nd most egregious abuser of this program is Tesla, whose profits would be nearly non-existent without those credits and now the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ is having major butt-hurt over the loss of revenue: 

Despite the occasional stock market rally, Tesla is clearly struggling. The EV company, once the crown jewel of its industry, has seen steep declines over the past year, as its CEO, Elon Musk, continues to draw criticism over his political activities. Sales for the company are down all over the world, despite its recent introduction to new markets, like India. Now, as Tesla struggles to keep its head above water, another significant revenue stream is about to run dry, thanks largely to Musk’s former “buddy,” President Trump.

On September 30th, the EV regulatory credit is set to expire. The program, which has allowed gas-powered vehicles to sidestep federal fines linked to the pollution they create, has served to enrich a small number of electric vehicle producers, most notably Tesla. To avoid getting dinged over their emissions (the government has incentivized EV production by fining firms that fail to produce a certain threshold of zero-emission cars), traditional car companies can purchase “credits” from EV makers like Tesla, which allows them to stay within compliance.

For years, the EV regulatory credit has provided Musk’s company with a financial lifeline. Indeed, according to an E&E News analysis of Tesla’s securities filings, the company has earned over $10 billion from the scheme, a third of the company’s total profits over the last decade. Reuters reports that such credits are currently “crucial for Tesla’s finances” and that they have represented the “main driver” of the company’s profits during the first quarter of 2025. In that sense, despite its supposed mission of making the world a healthier place, Tesla has ironically helped to incentivize the continued production of gas-guzzling, emissions-producing cars, as the EV credits scheme has allowed many of the big-name automakers to continue on with business-as-usual.

 I've had my schadenfreude for the month.

Today in Carbon Credits

As I have noted the carbon credit market is a particularly criminogenic activity, and we have another example of this, with the CEO of a major carbon credit developer being charged with a massive years long carbon credit fraud.

Hoocoodanode?

On 2 October 2024, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced criminal charges against Ken Newcombe, ex-CEO of carbon credit project developer, C-Quest Capital LLC. Newcombe was indicted on wire fraud, commodities fraud, and securities fraud. If found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

In February 2024, Newcombe resigned as CEO of C-Quest Capital, the company he set up in 2008. C-Quest is incorporated in the tax and secrecy haven of Delaware.

Newcombe was a major promoter of carbon trading, having worked at the World Bank, Climate Change Capital, and Goldman Sachs, before launching C-Quest Capital.

He was a member of Verra’s board [The non profit responsible for setting the Verified Carbon Standard for carbon offsets] from 2007 to December 2023.

………

The charges are against Newcombe and Tridip Goswami, former head of C-Quest’s carbon and sustainable accounting team. Jason Steele, C-Quest’s ex-chief operating officer pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the US authorities.

The indictment accuses Newcombe and Goswami of carrying out a fraud from 2021 to 2023 that resulted in their company CQC Impact Investors LLC “fraudulently obtaining carbon credits worth tens of millions of dollars”.

They are accused of “fraudulently altering data to show that CQC’s cookstoves achieved increased fuel savings and by manipulating the data-collection process to make it appear that more of CQC’s stoves were operational than was actually the case”. CQC allegedly received millions more carbon credits than it otherwise would have done because of this fraud.

Newcombe is also accused of using the fraudulently obtained carbon credits to deceive an investor into agreeing to invest up to US$250 million in CQC. The deal also included the investor buying some of Newcombe’s shares for more than US$16 million.

As an FYI, this technology is nothing new.  It's called a, "Rocket Stove", and it is generally more efficient than conventional wood stoves.

Of course, their business model was to use this to generate carbon credits, and there it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get honest numbers for this, so they lied.

The carbon credit markets encourage fraud, whether it is something like this, or as is the casse of organizations like the Nature Conservancy, reselling forests that had already been set aside for preservation.

This is why I favor a carbon tax over cap and trade.

Truer than Taxes

Private Investment Cannot and Should Not Drive Decarbonisation. It's Obvious: We Need the State.

 —The Break Down

We have seen the results of, "Market Based Interventions," to reduce carbon emissions.

They do not generate emission reductions, they generate fraud, where you have outfits like the Nature Conservancy selling forests that are already protected as carbon offsets.

The private sector is motivated by profits, and the most effective way to generate profits is through fraud, period, full stop.

A Feature, Not a Bug

I am completely not shocked that a massive carbon offset program in Australia is a fraud.

This is not a surprise.

As my posts on the Nature Conservancy show this is the default behavior.

Either they are taking credit for vegetation not under threat, or they are misrepresenting the savings involved:

Australia's carbon credit scheme was undermined by damning new research Wednesday, which found a world-leading reforestation project had been an underperforming "catastrophe".

Vast swathes of land across Australia's desert Outback have been earmarked for native forest regeneration, which is meant to offset emissions as new trees suck up carbon.

But researchers have found that across almost 80 percent of these plantations forest growth was either stagnant – or that woodlands were shrinking.………

Australia has set aside almost 42 million hectares (104 million acres) under the scheme, an area larger than the landmass of Japan.

Researchers said it was "one of the world's largest" natural carbon offset projects.

Officials claim that since 2013, the native forest spreading across this land has sucked up more than 27 million tonnes of carbon.

But the peer-reviewed research, which used satellite imagery to chart forest growth, has cast serious doubt on this figure.

………

The peer-reviewed research was published in the Nature Communications journal, Earth & Environment.

Australia has committed to cutting carbon emissions by 43 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels, on a path to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

Australia's carbon dioxide emissions per person are among the highest in the world at 15.3 tonnes, surpassing US levels, World Bank figures show.

Carbon offsets are a criminogenic activity.

Its structure not only favors fraud, it practically demands fraud.

It's Always Been a Scam

Fail

Once again, we discover that most carbon offsets are a scam.

This time, it's Verra, the not for profit that sets the standards for carbon offsets.

This is not a surprise.  The incentives are all for carbon theater rather than real carbon offsets.

If the offsets had to be :

The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading provider and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation.

The research into Verra, the world’s leading carbon standard for the rapidly growing $2bn (£1.6bn) voluntary offsets market, has found that, based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be “phantom credits” and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

The analysis raises questions over the credits bought by a number of internationally renowned companies – some of them have labelled their products “carbon neutral”, or have told their consumers they can fly, buy new clothes or eat certain foods without making the climate crisis worse.

But doubts have been raised repeatedly over whether they are really effective.

The nine-month investigation has been undertaken by the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial, a non-profit investigative journalism organisation. It is based on new analysis of scientific studies of Verra’s rainforest schemes.

It has also drawn on dozens of interviews and on-the-ground reporting with scientists, industry insiders and Indigenous communities. The findings – which have been strongly disputed by Verra – are likely to pose serious questions for companies that are depending on offsets as part of their net zero strategies.

Verra, which is based in Washington DC, operates a number of leading environmental standards for climate action and sustainable development, including its verified carbon standard (VCS) that has issued more than 1bn carbon credits. It approves three-quarters of all voluntary offsets. Its rainforest protection programme makes up 40% of the credits it approves and was launched before the Paris agreement with the aim of generating revenue for protecting ecosystems.

………

The journalists again analysed these results more closely and found that, in 32 projects where it was possible to compare Verra’s claims with the study finding, baseline scenarios of forest loss appeared to be overstated by about 400%. Three projects in Madagascar have achieved excellent results and have a significant impact on the figures. If those projects are not included, the average inflation is about 950%.

It's the same scam as I noted for the Nature Conservancy. 

Money gets paid, reports get written, and all of the people who do that have jobs.

They are bullshit jobs, at least according to the definition put forward by the late David Graeber, but jobs, and careers are built on this.

This is why a carbon tax works better than cap and trade.

They Are All Shams

A whistle-blower in Australia is claiming that Australia’s carbon credit scheme is, "largely a scam."

This is a feature, and not a bug, of carbon offsets, and to a slightly lesser degree cap and trade, as shown by the Nature Conservancy, where the bulk of their funding comes from their sales of fraudulent ecological offsets. (Selling offsets to save forests that will never be logged under any circumstances)

The problem with, "Market based solutions," to climate change, as opposed to explicit regulations or taxes, is that they inevitably require a lot of involvement from the finance industry, and corruption is how the finance industry makes money:

A whistleblower who spent years working on the integrity of the Australian government’s carbon credit system has launched an extraordinary attack on the scheme, describing it as a fraud that is hurting the environment and has wasted more than $1bn in taxpayer funding.

Prof Andrew Macintosh, the former head of the government’s Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, said the growing carbon market overseen by the government and the Clean Energy Regulator was “largely a sham” as most of the carbon credits approved did not represent real or new cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

His critique – outlined in four new academic papers – has major implications for the credibility of the Coalition’s $4.5bn “direct action” emissions reduction fund, through which the government buys carbon credits from rural landholders and other businesses.

It also raises questions for the rapidly growing number of polluting companies promising to buy carbon credits to offset their impact on the planet. The private market in carbon credits was worth $150m last year.

Because Markets Never Fail, They Can Only Be Failed

The Walton family, whose retail giant Walmart is the poster child for privatizing profits and socializing costs, has a proposal for fixing the drought crisis in the American Southwest, just allow rich people to speculate recklessly with the water that millions of people need to live.

It sounds like a  bad Cyberpunk novel, but so does everything coming from the American right wing these days.

BTW, the last time that a major American corporate entity tried to make a buck from privatizing drinking water, it was Enron:

The first-ever official shortage on the Colorado River has intensified a debate over how to provide water for 40 million people across the Southwest and irrigate fields of thirsty crops like wheat, cotton and alfalfa.

………

A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that a charitable foundation controlled by the Waltons, the Walton Family Foundation, has given about $200 million over the past decade to a variety of advocacy groups, universities and media outlets involved in the river. No other donor comes close. Two federal officials once affiliated with the foundation have been named to key Biden administration posts overseeing the river.

Yeah, THAT'S reassuring.

Putting a monetary value on water has raised concerns among those who benefit from guaranteed access to water and those who believe markets benefit investors while hurting farmers and the poor. Water markets in Australia have been blamed for helping dry up waterways due to overuse by a handful of wealthy farmers and investors.

“Any time that the water starts becoming more valuable than the land, you end up with the possibility of outside speculators,” said Andrew Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District, a public planning and policy agency that oversees water use in western Colorado. Mr. Mueller said his state has been seeing continued interest in agricultural water and lands by outside investment groups.

………

The Nature Conservancy, a public charity focused on conservation that has received funding from the Waltons, said in a 2016 report that such markets can “secure a regular flow of water back to depleted ecosystems and sell the rest back to irrigators or cities.” An added benefit, it said, is “a material return for investors.”

You remember the Nature Conservancy, one of the largest ecological "non-profits" in the United States, for whom the bulk of their funding comes from their sales of fraudulent ecological offsets.

The Walton Family Foundation is to the public good as Ebola is to French kissing.

It's pretty clear that the first use principle of water right allocation has ill served the region, and is disastrous now, but triggering a private equity scramble for profits will be far worse.

What is needed is the public management, and ownership of water, managed by a government organization through open and transparent processes.

Why Cap and Trade Sucks

At the core of Cap and Trade carbon controls is trading of tax credits, and the creation and trading of tax credits is a function which actively encourages fraudulent behavior. 

Case in point is the Massachusetts Audubon Society, which announced its intention to log thousands of acres that it was preserving in western Massachusetts so that it could then sell credits for not chopping down the trees.

Of course, it never actually intended to chop down these cheese, this was just a way to create carbon credits that had no basis in reality, and then sell them to polluting business, with no actual reduction in emissions.

In addition to the Mass Audubon Society, the Nature Conservancy is notorious for its sale of meaningless carbon offsets:

The Massachusetts Audubon Society has long managed its land in western Massachusetts as crucial wildlife habitat. Nature lovers flock to these forests to enjoy bird-watching and quiet hikes, with the occasional bobcat or moose sighting.

But in 2015, the conservation nonprofit presented California’s top climate regulator with a startling scenario: It could heavily log 9,700 acres of its preserved forests over the next few years.

The group raised the possibility of chopping down hundreds of thousands of trees as part of its application to take part in California’s forest offset program.

Spoiler, the never intended to log this land.  They are engaging in a humbug.

The environmental organization has become a bunch of snollygosters.

………

The Air Resources Board accepted Mass Audubon’s project into its program, requiring the nonprofit to preserve its forests over the next century instead of heavily logging them. The nonprofit received more than 600,000 credits in exchange for its promise. The vast majority were sold through intermediaries to oil and gas companies, records show. The group earned about $6 million from the sales, Mass Audubon regional scientist Tom Lautzenheiser said.

On paper, the deal was a success. The fossil fuel companies were able to emit more CO2 while abiding by California’s climate laws. Mass Audubon earned enough money to acquire additional land for preservation, and to hire new staff working on climate change.

But it didn’t work out as well for the climate, unless Mass Audubon actually intended to start acting more like a timber company. The project wouldn’t achieve anywhere near the claimed levels of reduced carbon emissions if the nonprofit was getting credits for forests that were never in danger of aggressive logging. And every time a polluter uses a credit that didn’t actually save a ton of carbon, net emissions go up, undermining the point of the program.

………

New research by the San Francisco nonprofit CarbonPlan provides evidence that this is occurring: It shows that landowners in the program routinely maximize the number of trees they assert they could chop down if they weren’t given carbon credits, even if they have little history of logging or have mission statements in sharp opposition to such practices.

The research suggests the program could be significantly exaggerating the amount of carbon savings achieved.

“The nearly universal pattern we see in the data,” said Danny Cullenward, policy director at CarbonPlan and a coauthor of the study, corroborates concerns that “those projects are not delivering real climate benefits.”

(emphasis mine)

If you have direct tax on carbon, you eliminate this sort of fraud, what's more you can treat the carbon tax in the same way that a value added tax is, and refund upon export, and charge upon import, so as to make sure that bad actors on global warming don't get an effective subsidy for that bad behavior.

Today in Dysfunctional Ecological Policies

We have The Nature Conservancy selling imaginary carbon offsets.

This is why cap and trade and carbon offsets are a bad idea.

Our society is simply too corrupt for this.

We need the heavy hand of taxes, and the blunt force of the state without ANY opportunity for profit:

At first glance, big corporations appear to be protecting great swaths of U.S. forests in the fight against climate change.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has paid almost $1 million to preserve forestland in eastern Pennsylvania.

Forty miles away, Walt Disney Co. has spent hundreds of thousands to keep the city of Bethlehem, Pa., from aggressively harvesting a forest that surrounds its reservoirs.

Across the state line in New York, investment giant BlackRock Inc. has paid thousands to the city of Albany to refrain from cutting trees around its reservoirs.

JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock tout these projects as an important mechanism for slashing their own large carbon footprints. By funding the preservation of carbon-absorbing forests, the companies say, they’re offsetting the carbon-producing impact of their global operations. But in all of those cases, the land was never threatened; the trees were already part of well-preserved forests.

………

The Nature Conservancy recruits landowners and enrolls its own well-protected properties in carbon-offset projects, which generate credits that give big companies an inexpensive way to claim large emissions reductions. In these transactions, each metric ton of reduced emissions is represented by a financial instrument known as a carbon offset. The corporations buy the offsets, with the money flowing to the landowners and the Conservancy. The corporate buyers then use those credits to subtract an equivalent amount of emissions from their own ledgers.

………

Few have jumped into this growing market with as much zeal as the Nature Conservancy, which was founded 69 years ago by a small group of ecologists seeking to preserve the last unspoiled lands in the U.S. In the seven decades since, the nonprofit in Arlington, Va., has grown into an environmental juggernaut, protecting more than 125 million acres. Last year its revenue was $932 million, which eclipsed the combined budgets of the country’s next three largest environmental nonprofits.

Now, with an increasing number of companies looking for creative ways to cut emissions, the nonprofit has accelerated its work on carbon projects. But a review of hundreds of pages of documents underpinning those projects and interviews with a half-dozen participating landowners indicate that the Conservancy is often preserving forested lands that don’t need defending.

You see something similar in China, where they have built hydroelectric dams in remote regions, where they will never deliver power, so that offsets could be purchased by European companies for cap and trade.

We need real change, and financializing strategies for anthropogenic climate change is criminogenic.

We will not survive the fraud.