Excellent Bloomberg investigation sheds light on cynical greenwashing by The Nature Conservancy, JP Morgan, Disney and Blackrock

This greenwashing has no place anywhere, if we are to have any chance to make decisive climate progress

"It's a #ClimateEmergency, stupid"

THREAD

The Nature Conservancy is an environmental juggernaut, protecting more than 125 million acres by buying them and holding them. Last year its revenue was $932 million. It’s full of good people and has been doing great work since 1951

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But

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JP Morgan, Disney and BlackRock were given pollution absolutions by @nature_org – employing “far-fetched logic” - based on paying for protecting forests (and earning carbon credits) where the trees were already part of well-preserved forests

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That’s because @nature_org should never have signed-up its well-protected forests to earn carbon-offsets: they should not have qualified in the first place to generate offsets polluting corporations buy to help absolve them of their climate sins

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If the land is protected anyway, the project should not qualify for carbon credits. That’s by definition. And TNC knows that.

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This type of abuse is not limited to TNC and is rampant in natural-based solutions, Big Oil’s favorite cheat-device for doing less than nothing while pretending to do a lot

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I’ve accompanied the carbon credit market since almost its inception – and never dared touched forests because of the abuse potential in defining project boundaries. TNC should not have touched these forests either for carbon credits

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Hiding behind independent registries and third-party auditors is no excuse, TNC. There are no regulators in this space, and it’s a free for all where the only limiting factor is your conscience, and focusing on doing the right thing

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All existing forest carbon projects have some variant of this problem and only the very best should be generating carbon offsets: These should be only for real, carbon-positive changes to forest management at meaningful scales

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No wonder oil companies love “nature-based solutions:” They know greenwashing when they see it, and love to hug it, and these “solutions” very close

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TNC’s lust for revenues is evidently out of control and whichever rogue team within it is responsible for these types of shenanigans should be “restructured” – for the sake of TNC and the rest of us: We are in the midst of a #ClimateEmergency and we have no time for games

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We need much stricter rules about carbon accounting, because good carbon accounting means good climate stewardship: Independent registries and verification agencies need to be regulated to stop people like TNC creating credits that aren’t creating emissions reductions

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Here’s the Bloomberg investigation article:

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2020-nature-conservancy-carbon-offsets-trees/

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