Originally Posted by
zombietooth
I hope this thread doesn't devolve into blind support of the questionable "carbon offset" business. And it is a business, where workers, developers, land owners, project managers, carbon offset consultants, marketers and brokers, and even countries are making lots of money through commissions, inflated salaries, government subsidies, inflated land values, etc. And salaries and per diem at non-profits are powerful motivation to keep your "non-profit" going.
TerraPass is owned by
JustEnergy, a Canadian Natural gas and electricity reseller. Now, I have no problem with natural gas, but
TerraPass is in the business of making a profit.
Your "Gold Standard" organization verification is equivalent to
De Beers telling you that diamonds are "rare" and "a sound investment". Never trust someone with a vested interest in the product they are selling or promoting.
Perhaps you should read this:
https://features.propublica.org/braz...acre-cambodia/
You'll note in the article that, "85% of offset programs yield questionable benefits".
This is a good article as well, but older:
https://www.csmonitor.com/Environmen...global-warming
The propublica report is very good -- appreciate you posting it, and I'm all for being critical in this fairly new space. I'm sure that half of carbon offsets are trash. But it's also important to acknowledge that a) the report is primarily about re-forestation efforts (which are one of many types of carbon offsetting), and more importantly b) the concerns it raises about
some (or even
many) projects -- like additionality or double-counting -- are explicitly addressed by reputable companies, and yes, by the Gold Standard.
Granted, if you don't trust the Gold Standard verification, it's a no-starter -- then there's no way of verifying that a given project actually does address additionality and other pitfalls. But like that one quote noted: what else do we have that's better?
As for terrapass, I couldn't care less if they're for-profit -- in fact, being for-profit (and, I believe, publicly traded) is going to significantly increase their levels of accountability. If they take a cut from my carbon credits ... great, this is challenging work, I don't expect it to be done for free, and I myself don't want to do it. But I'm also not in any way partial to them; there's other good carbon credit vendors out there.