Tag: carbon offset

Cooley Alert: California’s Voluntary Carbon Market Disclosures Act

In this piece in the New Yorker, the author describes the inception in the late 1980s of the carbon-offsetting market, which emerged from the notion that carbon was a fungible commodity, like coffee or cotton. A U.S. power company had “conceived a novel way to reduce emissions: it could surround its main coal-fired power station with a forest, to absorb the carbon billowing from its chimney. That plan turned out to be implausible. Scientists calculated that, to absorb the carbon the facility would pump out in its life span, the company needed to plant some fifty-two million trees—an impossibility in densely populated Connecticut.”  But then an executive elsewhere “had an inspiration: since the atmosphere was a global commons, why not situate the forest elsewhere? The company eventually paid for forty thousand farmers to plant trees in the mountains of Guatemala. It cost just two million dollars—pennies per ton of carbon.” The idea caught on, and, a “decade later, the concept of carbon offsetting was enshrined in international law.”

Is buying a carbon offset like buying a medieval indulgence?

At a recent meeting of the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee discussing the SEC’s climate disclosure proposal, a speaker in charge of ESG investing at an asset manager raised the possible risk that companies, faced with a disclosure mandate, would just buy carbon offsets to satisfy investors that they are making progress toward their climate goals. His firm, he said, has been seeing this phenomenon occur, but he thought that the practice could lead to poor outcomes. Companies would probably experience better outcomes, he advised, if they first considered spending those same funds on investments that would actually reduce their carbon footprints.  (See this PubCo post. ) What’s that about? While many experts view carbon offsets as essential ingredients in the recipe for net-zero, some commentators worry that they are just part of a “well-intentioned shell game” or perhaps, less generously, a “racket with trees being treated as hostages”? And some think both concepts—essential and racket—may be true in some cases at the same time.  Are carbon offsets effective or are they just a way to assuage, as the NYT phrases it, “carbon guilt”?