About a decade ago I was at a climate conference at MIT, and talked with someone who said she'd gone to visit several certified carbon projects that turned out to not exist at all.

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on_the_train 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Maybe such cases. And it couldn't be easier. No one really cares about the actual carbon. Everyone just wants a piece of paper for as cheap as possible.

	▲	fusionadvocate 7 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Exactly this. And the incentive it creates is very perverted. It would be much easier to just tax CO2 at the source, instead of this corruption prone system of carbon credits where you need to audit thousands of places instead of only one: the oil pipe.
	▲	PyWoody 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I personally know of one that raised close to $100 million in financing, sold $50 million in "credits" to Microsoft, and the entire company turned out to be dumping concrete into the ocean to "sequester" the carbon. The founders still blame "woke" scientists for outing their scheme and doubting their "science." Of course, neither founders have any prior scientific or engineering experience. It's maddening talking them. I've met never anyone who is both anti-science but calls themselves scientists. Huh? EDIT: I should add that they have pivoted to AI, as you of course expected.

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nonameiguess 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's kind of weird to see this being published here now. Hacker News probably largely doesn't pay attention to the NBA, but there's a scandal right now whereby Steve Ballmer seems to have used a carbon credit company called Aspiration that was a pure scam and performed no actual offsetting of carbon usage in order to circumvent the salary cap, making investments into the hundreds of millions of dollars into this otherwise sell-nothing, do-nothing company so they could then give out do-nothing endorsement contracts to basketball players that didn't actually endorse them.

Makes me wonder how many other companies if not entire industries largely exist for money laundering and don't otherwise actually do anything.