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Amazon Blaze Raises Doubt On Carbon Offsets

Amazon Blaze Raises Doubt On Carbon Offsets

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Next month, California regulators will decide whether to support a plan for tropical forest carbon offsets, a controversial measure that could allow companies like Chevron, which is headquartered there, to write off some of their greenhouse gas emissions by paying people in countries like Brazil to preserve trees. The Amazon rainforest has long been viewed as a natural testing ground for this proposed Tropical Forest Standard, which, if approved, would likely expand to countries throughout the world.

Now that record fires are engulfing the Amazon, started by humans seeking to log, mine and farm on the land, supporters are using the international emergency to double down on their case for offsets. The Environmental Defense Fund posted a petition urging that state officials endorse the standard: “The people — and wildlife — who call the Amazon home are running for their lives,” it said. “The entire world is counting on [the board] taking action.” Ivaneide Bandeira Cardozo, who helped manage a Brazilian offset project that was derailed by illegal logging, said, “People who are against carbon credits are not suffering and don’t want to keep the forest standing.”

But the devastating blaze encapsulates a key weakness of offsets that scientists have been warning about for the past decade: that they are too vulnerable to political whims and disasters like wildfires. As a recent ProPublica investigation noted, if you give corporations a pass to pollute by saying their emissions are being canceled out somewhere else, you need a way to guarantee that continues to be the case.

Because carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for about 100 years, protected forests must remain intact for a century to offset the pollution; this requirement is written into the Tropical Forest Standard. That plan can go up in smoke the moment a country elects a president like Jair Bolsonaro, who took office in Brazil in January and de-funded environmental agencies, cut back on enforcement and encouraged the clearing of the Amazon for beef and soy production. Indigenous communities who live in the Amazon report a surge of intruders mining and logging on their land.

People have always exploited the forest illegally, “but in the last few months, it has increased significantly,” said Camões Boaventura, a federal prosecutor in the Brazilian state of Pará. Meanwhile, he said, environmental officials are struggling to pay for the gas they need to drive around enforcing regulations. Gisele Bleggi, a federal prosecutor in Rondônia, said Bolsonaro didn’t have to change a single environmental law to encourage deforestation. “Once you stop giving money for surveillance … the system it protects will collapse.”

One of the biggest sources of funding for the rainforest, the Amazon Fund, was suspended after Norway and Germany withdrew support worth $72 million. The fund has provided more than $1 billion over the past decade and is contingent on minimizing deforestation, but it doesn’t provide offsets that allow others to pollute. The countries suspended their payments amid a recent spike in deforestation and after Bolsonaro interfered with how the money would be used. In early August, Bolsonaro fired the head of the space agency after it released data showing rising deforestation.

The Amazon fires also showcase a second hurdle in making offsets work: For them to be a valid reflection of how much pollution is being canceled out, the math needs to be accurate. This accounting is especially hard to do after wildfires, because they stifle a forest’s regrowth far more than previously estimated. Scientists are just starting to understand this impact, which is hard to quantify and has led the Amazon’s carbon content to be overestimated, creating the potential to give offsets more credit than they’re worth.

This month, California state Sen. Bob Wieckowski urged the state’s Air Resources Board to reject the Tropical Forest Standard because it “risks producing a landslide of false credits.” His letter referenced ProPublica’s reporting and academic research that cited the challenges of ensuring credits are real. His letter followed an earlier one from California lawmakers who cautiously supported the standard but told the board to exercise “vigorous and proactive monitoring” to ensure offsets are valid.

Jeff Conant, who directs the international forests program at the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, said Brazil absolutely “should receive some money from the global north,” but not as offsets that give companies a “loophole” to continue emitting carbon. Conant said the offsets debate has been “a distraction” from what he considers the real solution: strong regulations and keeping fossil fuels in the ground. “We’ve been saying for over a decade that we need regulation, we need demand-side measures, we need to take responsibility for our own consumption up here in the north,” he said.

Both the Environmental Defense Fund and Conant support a California assembly bill designed to ensure the state government doesn’t buy paper, furniture or other forest products made from deforestation in the tropics. Companies with state contracts would need to certify that their products didn’t destroy sensitive ecosystems like the Amazon.

In Brazil, experts widely credit regulations as the driving force that brought deforestation to a record low in 2012; then, the federal government relaxed its stringent rules and enforcement, and it began to creep up, years before Bolsonaro took office. Brazil is “going backwards in the bigger picture,” said Matthew Hansen, a satellite and mapping expert at the University of Maryland. “I think that’s the bigger story.”

The wildfires have worsened fears that the Amazon is being pushed toward a tipping point where it will turn into a savanna, with devastating consequences for climate change and ecosystems. Luiz Aragão, who heads the remote sensing division at Brazil’s space agency, said 2019 has seen the highest number of fires since 2010, and it’s just the start of the fire season, which ends in November. He said the human-set fires — which were almost all started on agricultural or newly cleared land — will spread into healthy, intact areas of the rainforest, and it will take time to figure out how much of the forest is burned. There are no reports yet that any of the offset projects located in the Amazon are on fire.

Many supporters of offsets, including Cardozo, who runs an indigenous rights organization in Rondônia, also support more traditional conservation aid like the Amazon Fund, but they say offsets are necessary because rich countries aren’t willing to provide enough funding to preserve forests without getting something in return.

As global leaders discussed the Amazon over the weekend at the G7 meeting and pledged $22 million to help fight the fires, prosecutors in Brazil are eyeing measures they can take even in the face of a hostile presidential administration. Boaventura, who works for the Public Ministry, a powerful independent federal agency, said his team is investigating the role that Bolsonaro and national environmental agencies have had on increasing deforestation and fires.

“Once this link is proven, we want to hold the agencies and authorities that justified this destructive action against society accountable,” Boaventura said.

UN Environmental Agency Sharply Criticizes Carbon Offsets

UN Environmental Agency Sharply Criticizes Carbon Offsets

 

The United Nations drew attention this week for an article published by its environment program that criticized carbon offsets, a strategy the UN has supported for two decades. The headline: “Carbon offsets are not our get-out-of-jail free card.”

It came three weeks after ProPublica published a widely discussed investigation into how offsets related to forest preservation have not provided the promised carbon savings and instead have given polluters a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂.

“Scientists, activists and concerned citizens have started to voice their concerns over how carbon offsets have been used by polluters as a free pass for inaction,” the UN article said.

Niklas Hagelberg, a senior program officer at the Nairobi, Kenya-based UN Environment Programme, said ProPublica’s investigation contributed to the questions raised over offsets, capturing key challenges such as how to accurately monitor trees in protected areas and how to fund livelihoods for forest communities that don’t involve cutting down trees.

The UN article addressed all types of offsets, including renewable energy, tree planting and energy efficiency. Hagelberg told ProPublica the main message is that offsets shouldn’t be used as an excuse not to act. Industries use offsets because they are usually cheaper than reducing emissions on site. However, companies should exhaust their own low-cost reductions before buying offsets from another sector, he said. For instance, it costs oil and gas companies very little to cut certain types of methane leaks, he said. “It’s almost like, fix your own house, clean your own room first.”

The UN Environment Programme, billed on its website as the “leading global environmental authority that sets the global environmental agenda,” says it has been “carbon neutral” since 2008 through a mix of net reductions and offsets such as wind and hydropower projects. The offsets come from the Clean Development Mechanism, implemented under a separate UN office that handles global climate talks.

Clean Development Mechanism credits have come under fire for environmental and human rights scandals. The ProPublica investigation noted a 2016 study that found 85% of the offsets had a “low likelihood” of creating real reductions.

In an emailed statement, the program’s communications office said it has reduced its reliance on these offsets over time, and these credits are “rigorously managed and controlled.” When selecting offsets, they “take into consideration those which may also have additional social and environmental benefits.”

Hagelberg said his agency has no plans to change the types of offsets it uses. “My main concern is that we actually reduce our emissions, our real emissions, instead of having to go to the offsets side,” he said. Offsets remain part of the climate solution for now, he said, though they will need to be reevaluated in the future.

The program stirred controversy this week after it took down a more pointed version of the article published Monday, which said: “The era of carbon offsets is drawing to a close. Buying carbon credits in exchange for a clean conscience while you carry on flying, buying diesel cars and powering your home with fossil fuels is no longer acceptable or widely accepted.”

Climate Home News, a London-based news site, reached out to the program with questions after the “unusually stark critique,” with a headline announcing, “UN Environment official attacks agency’s own carbon offsetting policy.” The next day, the language that offsets were “no longer acceptable or widely accepted” was edited to say they are “being challenged by people concerned about climate change.”

When asked why he’d revised the article, Hagelberg said it went through an editing process that “added a little more spice,” resulting in a version posted online that “went perhaps too far.” It was later revised “so there’s no ambiguity in the message,” he said.

Even the revised article is “further than I’ve seen any UN body go” in discussing offsets and their growing opposition, said Taylor Billings, media director for Corporate Accountability, an advocacy group that monitors the fossil fuel industry’s influence on global climate talks. Since the criticism is coming from a UN agency publication, it makes it harder for UN Climate Change — the office that created the Clean Development Mechanism — to ignore those flaws, Billings said. “It’s an indication that the tide is turning on this blind faith in offset programs to get us out” of the climate crisis, Billings said.

The UN has publicly struggled to reconcile its support for offsets with evidence that they are problematic. As Climate Home News reported, UN Climate Change released a video in August titled “keep calm and offset,” which “appeared to suggest that viewers could lead a carbon-heavy lifestyle as long as they offset their emissions. It was taken down after a backlash.”

Rules governing global carbon offsets remain contentious and are consistently debated at UN climate talks. They will be discussed at coming talks in Bonn, Germany, starting next week.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

 

 

 

IMAGE: The Amazon rainforest via Flickr.

Activists Say California Fighting Pollution Globally But Not Locally

Activists Say California Fighting Pollution Globally But Not Locally

By Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau

In the San Francisco Bay Area oil port city of Martinez, where a colossal Shell refinery has long tainted the air, the landmark California law that requires polluters to ease their carbon footprint seemed to some to promise new relief.

But one big move by Shell to comply with rules on greenhouse gas emissions won’t do much for Martinez. It will instead give a boost to the environment in the pristine Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the oil company is helping preserve a 200,000-acre forest.

California regulators are satisfied the forest project will be a sponge for greenhouse gases, helping reduce global warming. It doesn’t matter that the trees grow nowhere near California.
Advocates for the local community heatedly disagree.

In California and across the country, the purchase of so-called carbon offsets by large corporations sits at the root of a bitter dispute over the extent to which companies dealing with a global problem have an obligation to help their local environments.

The dispute has taken on new importance as more states mull over whether to adopt California’s model amid the Obama administration’s push to place strict new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

“We think the residents who are disproportionately burdened by this pollution should benefit,” said Guillermo Mayer, president of Public Advocates, a San Francisco environmental justice group. “Instead of reducing the pollution locally through better technology or ramping down emissions, you get to buy trees in another part of the world. The residents nearby aren’t helped.”

Mayer calls it absurd that California companies may be able to reach as much as half of their emission reduction goals over the next several years through efforts that include not just planting trees, but capturing methane from cow manure in New York and recycling refrigerators in Arkansas. An environmental justice panel assembled by the state to advise regulators similarly warned against using out-of-state offsets.

But other environmental organizations disagree.

Groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund see offsets as a major selling point of California’s climate reduction strategy. Giving companies the flexibility to search the nation, and perhaps the globe, for ways to reduce emissions helps lower the cost of reducing the global warming threat while inspiring investment in conservation projects, they say.

“What this program is supposed to achieve is a reduction in greenhouse gases,” said Emilie Mazzacurati, managing director of Four Twenty Seven, a Berkeley, Calif., firm that advises on climate change strategies. “Greenhouse gases are, by their nature, global. It doesn’t matter where they come from. They all go into the atmosphere.”

Emboldened by the support of some big environmental groups, California regulators express no regrets about their fledgling offset program — even as they try to work out kinks.

The state has blocked offset plans that seem questionable. One program in Arkansas, for example, was placed under investigation after state officials discovered that companies were buying offsets involving a facility that disposes of toxic refrigerants but was operating without a federal environmental permit.

Questions over the state’s ability to police faraway projects loom over the program. Regulators are nonetheless looking into expanding it beyond the United States. In Mexico and Brazil, California polluters could be awarded offset credits for investing in efforts to preserve the rain forest.

Boosters of such an expansion aggressively fought back a legislative effort last year to limit the use of offsets outside California. They even paid to bring the champion of the proposal, state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, to join them on a research trip to Mexico. The Environmental Defense Fund covered Lara’s $2,363 tab.

The California Air Resources Board, which enforces the state’s emissions rules, won’t say which companies are purchasing offsets and where they purchase them. “Each entity’s strategy in purchasing offsets is considered market sensitive,” said Stanley Young, a spokesman for the board.

In November, Young said, data will start to be released showing how many offsets are being used by what companies, but not where the offset projects are based. Environmental justice activists are maddened by the secrecy.

Shell’s plan was made public in a news release by the organizers of the Michigan forestry project. California’s major electricity companies, meanwhile, have made clear in public filings that they also are looking to make big offset purchases.

Most of those deals probably will not be linked to environmental projects in California. The air board’s list of approved offsets is dominated by out-of-state endeavors. In part, officials said, that’s because the state’s environment already is pretty clean.

“California is proactive and has many regulations to protect the environment,” Young said. Thus “it is a challenge to identify sources of offsets in California.”

The reasoning baffles Vien Truong, director of environmental quality at the Greenlining Institute.

“People say California is green, and we don’t need to worry about making those investments here, but it is not true,” she said. The so-called fence-line communities, adjacent to factories and plants, “have often not benefited from the state’s clean-tech boom and clean economy. It skips right over us.”

Such grievances are laid out in detail in a complaint the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment in San Francisco filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over California’s offset program.

It contends that the offsets violate the Civil Rights Act by depriving minority communities of the benefits of cleaner air. The EPA has declined to take any action.

Photo: Justin Brockie via Flickr

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