Carbon markets still promise big but deliver little, the Global North’s economic development path will not work for the Global South, an uncontrolled sale of rat poison is needlessly killing native wildlife.

Carbon markets – a get-of-jail-free card for big polluters

I have ranted and raved about the inadequacies of carbon offset schemes on several occasions but their inbuilt structural and procedural deficiencies (rather than minor irritating glitches) are too serious to be covered once and then forgotten.

The Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM) is the global system that facilitates the sale of carbon credits by their producers to organisations that (for the most part) want to offset rather than reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). A carbon credit represents one tonne of CO2 removed from or not emitted to the atmosphere. Voluntary, I assume, refers to the fact that the sellers and buyers are participating of their own volition rather than as a legal requirement. Alternatively, the buyers could, for instance, choose to reduce their emissions.

The attraction of the VCM to the participants is that the credit producers and the accrediting agencies get paid, the emissions producers can claim to be “carbon neutral” or “Green” or “net zero” without reducing their emissions and governments can say they are doing something to combat climate change.

Since the concept of ’net zero’ emerged, the VCM has been very popular with governments and the private sector. It even features in the Paris Agreement, where it has been the subject of much criticism and dispute over the years. Many evaluations of the VCM have demonstrated that most carbon offset projects have failed to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and there have been several attempts to fix the repeated failures in the VCM.

So where do we stand now? Have the fixes worked? Is the VCM now helping to reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere or is it still a flimsy veil attempting to cover up the uncomfortable fact that most carbon offset projects are failing to reduce emissions or increase removal of CO2 from the air? Is it delaying real climate action by permitting polluters to keep emitting GHGs for as long as possible while allowing governments to say, “Of course we’re serious about combating climate change. Look at the system we’ve established!” – eg, the Safeguard Mechanism in Australia.

An analysis (aptly named Built to Fail) of 47 of the world’s largest carbon offset projects in........

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