A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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BP CEO Bernard Looney | Daniel Leal-Olivas/Getty |
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Another week, another set of reports on the problem with carbon offsets. Last week’s newsletter noted that California’s carbon market isn’t as reliable as hoped: ProPublica and MIT Technology Review jointly reported on analysis from San Francisco nonprofit CarbonPlan that the state’s forest offset program had created “tens of millions of carbon credits with dubious climate value,” essentially allowing polluters to keep polluting under cover of bogus offsets. A day after that newsletter went out, TNR’s Kate Aronoff reported on the offsets included in Washington state’s recently passed Climate Commitment Act. BP supported the bill, which it hadn’t done with a prior state proposal to establish a carbon tax. But the oil giant also, just six months ago, “announced it had acquired a majority stake in a company called Finite Carbon, ‘aiming for rapid growth.’” Finite Carbon is essentially an offset company, helping landowners package their land for carbon credits. Kate connected the dots between Washington’s law, BP, and the CarbonPlan findings. The new carbon market that the Climate Commitment Act will establish is widely expected to be linked to California’s at some point. Finite Carbon’s offset packages in California’s system are some of the ones CarbonPlan found wanting. “If Finite Carbon’s offsets are deemed eligible by the Washington Department of Ecology, tasked with designing the standards for the new offsets, BP could theoretically play both sides of the carbon accounting ledger,” Kate wrote. |
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| Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
| —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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But even beyond that implication (and as Kate pointed out, Washington’s law has more safeguards than California’s for limiting bogus offsets), there’s a danger that this new law could lend credibility to offsets at a moment when it’s increasingly clear they need to be rethought. It’s natural for fossil fuel companies to support offsets, Kate has argued: It helps them meet “net-zero” goals while not changing their underlying business model. Meanwhile, it’s troubling to see conservation groups participating in schemes that aren’t necessarily fighting climate change: The Nature Conservancy, whose own offsets were the subject of a stunning Bloomberg exposé in December, has also backed Washington’s law—and even, like BP, participated in its drafting. Finally, on Monday, Lisa Song and James Temple, the duo behind the ProPublica/MIT Technology Review story, published another devastating report: The Massachusetts Audubon Society, which “has long managed its land in western Massachusetts as crucial wildlife habitat,” has also participated in these shenanigans. In 2015, it briefly argued that it had the right to log its lands, and thus it should earn carbon credits by not logging them. (You have to show “additionality” for offsets—that you’re preserving carbon sinks that would otherwise be destroyed, or are planting new trees, or whatever. This is the point many carbon offsets struggle with.) Song and Temple’s report is careful. It’s worth reading the comment they received from Mass Audubon, which feels it secured important funds for conservation programs that are actually benefiting the environment, and that “financial incentives to protect forests” can be useful. But Song and Temple also make a crucial broader point about monetizing conservation as offsets: “By their nature, forest offset systems create incentives for landowners to exaggerate the amount of logging possible on their property.” And by exaggerating that amount of logging, offset systems risk actually increasing the emissions that are allowed under certain climate policy, by providing cover for polluters to keep polluting. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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That’s roughly how long periodical cicadas have been using prime numbers to evade predators, according to genetic analysis. Read Eleanor Cummins’s wild piece about how that evolutionary strategy—which biologists think began with natural climate change, during glacial periods—could be threatened now by human-caused global warming. |
The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation now has its first “chief climate officer,” looking at how to use development finance to fight global warming. (What sorts of policies this will produce remains to be seen. Read Kate Aronoff’s previous coverage of what serious climate-mitigating international finance reform might look like.) |
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| Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
Kate predicted that people would start to get a little more vocal about the Biden administration’s slowish progress on climate change after the first 100 days. And it’s happening. Read Christopher Flavelle’s report at The New York Times on concerns about whether Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda is doing enough on the climate resilience front. |
“You can’t simply say, we’re going to have resilient infrastructure, without having a plan and definition for what that means,” said Alice Hill, who oversaw climate resilience during the Obama administration. The concerns raised about Mr. Biden’s actions so far highlight the difference between two distinct areas of climate action. In addition to cutting the emissions of planet-warming gases, experts are increasingly urging the federal government to help prepare communities for the effects of that warming, such as worsening storms and rising seas. Those policies, which experts call climate adaptation, can be unpopular: They can include tougher and more expensive building standards in areas exposed to flooding or hurricanes; allowing fewer homes to be built in those places to begin with; or even encouraging people to leave. |
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