Tag: Voluntary Carbon Market Disclosures Act

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.”