A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

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.

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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