There has been a move to get the FTC to start labeling these net carbon numbers as misleading advertising because it always includes a bunch of purchased offsets unrelated to the company. Further, there have been some real and complicated situations where carbon credits were sold more than the actual amount of offset carbon -- meaning for example BigCorpA and BigCorpB buy the same "green energy infra" credits from projects that are in construction and then never actually meet their listed goals, but both companies claim to be carbon neutral because of the claims for several years before that comes out. Matt Levine had a very interesting column on forestry in the US Southeast talking about places getting paid to not cut down trees far in excess of the number of trees that could realistically be harvested. Google might be frontrunning some of those arguments. Or might have done the real audit of the claims and realized that they had been less carbon offset than they thought, so safer to just pull the whole pledge at least in the short term.

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Muromec 3 days ago | parent [-]

>There has been a move to get the FTC to start labeling these net carbon numbers as misleading advertising because it always includes a bunch of purchased offsets unrelated to the company

Which is good, because carbon offset are a scam.

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mullingitover 3 days ago | parent [-]

Cap and trade is a perfectly sound strategy for reducing carbon emissions, and carbon offsets are valid part of the 'trade.' There's the potential for fraud, but fraud can happen anywhere and there's nothing special about carbon offsets that makes them entirely fraudulent. The market and regulators have already been accounting for this through third party verification.

Now, if you are a fossil fuel megacorp and want to burn the entire cap and trade system to the ground, creating a 'carbon offsets are a scam' meme and destroying the 'trade' side is a great way to manufacture consent to get rid of that pesky 'cap.'

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abdullahkhalids 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> there's nothing special about carbon offsets that makes them entirely fraudulent

The problem is that what gets exchanged in the marked is a certificate but the purpose of the market is to create a positive externality. This means the buyers and sellers don't have an inventive to be honest.

The buyer of the carbon credits doesn't actually need the carbon to be captured. They just want a certificate for X credits, so they can emit elsewhere or get some other benefit.

The seller doesn't actually need to capture the carbon. As long as they can make a convincing enough case to the buyer that they did capture the carbon, the buyer is happy to buy.

This is unlike a typical market where the seller does have an incentive to fool the buyers into a buying a subpar product, but the buyer has a lot of economic incentive to actually not be fooled.

	▲	nostrademons 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There are 3rd-party enforcement mechanisms. It's not as simple as the seller saying "We don't pollute, trust us"; there are actual government inspectors and NGO delegates that go out, visit factories, and fine them if their actual emissions don't match the declared permits: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/resources/documents/mrr-enforcement The bigger issue, as mentioned above, is that there's often a time lag between when the seller receives the money and when the seller can actually put it to use to reduce carbon emissions. One of the biggest sellers of carbon credits, for instance, is CA high-speed rail, which is decades away from completion. If it doesn't actually complete, it's not going to take any cars off the road or planes out of the sky, and so all the carbon credits it sold would just allow fossil fuel emitters to maintain status-quo emissions. But as a way of diverting private resources from CO2 emitters to greener alternatives, cap & trade has been pretty effective. Over half the cars in my Bay Area city are now EVs; Tesla was kept afloat for many years by selling carbon credits.
	▲	Muromec 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This. Both parties in the market are in on the same scam to fool the end customer and shareholders

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Muromec 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Its a scam as long as emitting CO2 and then buying credits doesnt result in capturing the emitted amount from the athmosphere, yet allows one to claim net neitrality in a market where customers are somewhat critical