Thread by @doctorow

The theory behind carbon offsets is that markets created the climate emergency, so markets will solve it. It's a kind of high-stakes denialism, like a lifelong smoker switching to "light" cigarettes after learning they have stage four lung-cancer.

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The climate emergency owes its existence to market doctrine: that firms should manage their affairs to maximize shareholder value, irrespective of the costs that maximization imposes on everyone else.

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By that logic, all corporate crime is the result of "poor incentives" - maimed workers, ruined neighborhoods and toxic spills are the results of underpriced insurance, or fines that are set too low.

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Rather than criminalizing the conduct that leads to these outcomes - shutting down companies that engage in the conduct, holding managers and shareholders personally liable for it - market doctrine insists that we should "rebalance the incentives."

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Enter carbon offsets: rather than prohibiting the pollution that will render our planet permanently uninhabitable by our species, we make that pollution economically disfavorable, by offering bribes to companies that promise not to pollute.

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Buy a forest, promise not to cut it down, get a tradeable credit. If the credits pay more than clearcutting, the incentives net out in favor of not committing genocide. As the @ClimateAd Project puts it, this amounts to a "murder offset."

pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for…

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From the start, offsets raised an obvious question: how do you know that someone who pledges not to pollute was planning to pollute? How do you keep the system from turning into a market for lemons? Here's a 2010 article raising those questions:

csmonitor.com/Environment/20…

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Fast forward a decade. The answers to the questions remain elusive, but the market for lemons is in full swing. Environmental, Social and Governance (#ESG) funds are full of absolute garbage, stuff that doesn't even pass the giggle-test:

pluralistic.net/2021/03/24/gre…

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Offsets are the worst. Corrupt "charities" like @nature_org make vast fortunes ($932m in 2019) helping the world's worst polluters greenwash their fortunes by offering offsets for set-asides on lands that would never be logged anyway.

pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fai…

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The Conservancy has a history of boasting about its role in burnishing the credentials of sociopaths who want to watch the world burn:

"The only problem with tainted money is there tain't enough of it" -Patrick Noonan, Conservancy President, 1973-80

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Despite that, carbon offsets remain credible, but perhaps that'll change. After all, Oregon's 400,000-acre (and counting) Bootleg Fire is consuming vast of carbon offset forests, releasing the carbon the public paid logging companies not to release.

cnn.com/2021/07/22/wea…

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Once that public money was in private hands, it returned to public officials - regulators who oversee Oregon's forests, who "sought to discredit climate scientists and operated as a de facto lobbying and public relations arm for the timber industry"

propublica.org/article/tax-fu…

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Offsets don't just fail to mitigate the climate emergency - they have a business model: funneling lots of public money to rich people, like the millionaire residents of a gated Pennsylvania estate who got huge tax breaks for their private park.

inquirer.com/business/inq2/…

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Everything we do to fix offsets just makes them worse: adding complexity to a loophole-riddled system creates more loopholes. We can't save the world and our species with improved murder offsets.

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Image:
Cristian Ibarra Santillan (modified)
flickr.com/photos/cristia…

CC BY:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.…

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/07/26/agg…