[HN Gopher] The warring conmen at the heart of a EUR5B carbon tr...
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The warring conmen at the heart of a EUR5B carbon trading scam
Author : elorant
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-06-04 17:59 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| asdff wrote:
| I think the fundamental issue with things like carbon credits, is
| that we are asking an industry that knowingly got us into this
| mess in bad faith to suddenly act in good faith to get us out of
| this mess. It almost feels like giving tax credits to the mafia
| for helping an old lady across the street.
| neaden wrote:
| It also incentives for hostage taking like behavior. "Oh wow
| sure is a nice forest I own, it would be a shame if I cut it
| down if only someone would pay me to keep it."
| asdff wrote:
| Not to mention, sometimes estimates for how much carbon a
| given credit producing entity captures are way off. Sometimes
| maliciously poorly estimated I am sure. There's also no doubt
| enforcement and oversight mechanisms are insufficient by
| design.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| And to keep your coal/cement/refinery/whatever plant
| operating as long as you can until you get a huge cheque to
| stop.
|
| And if/when carbon credits become a thing, you know that
| nobody else can just start up as freely as you did and
| compete with you. You got there first so you're special!
| lupusreal wrote:
| The carbon credits based on counterfactuals (e.g. how many
| trees on this forest _would have been_ cut down in some
| alternate universe) are true insanity. Impossible to verify
| by their very nature, and the schemes to estimate their
| truthfulness (measuring deforestation of neighboring forests)
| are easy to game. For instance the owner of a forest that
| wouldn 't have been deforested anyway can claim he would
| have, then pay locals a smaller reward to ruin neighboring
| forests to "verify" the legitimacy of his claim.
| Hermel wrote:
| No, the fundamental issue with carbon credits is its economics.
| It would be much healthier to set a fixed price for carbon
| emissions. This price should be based on the externalities
| caused by the emissions. In the worst case, the price is the
| cost of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere again. Such a
| fixed price, a carbon tax, would help the industry because it
| would make production costs more predictable, and it would be
| much more fair than carbon credits assigned to those firms that
| hire the best lobbyists. When fixing the emission quantity
| instead of its price, the price of carbon credits tend to
| either go to 0 (if there are too many) or infinity (if there
| are not enough) at the end of a credit period, which is total
| nonsense. However, for politicians, carbon credits are much
| more attractive because being able to distribute them gives
| them power.
| Timothee wrote:
| This story is told in the Netflix documentary "Lords of Scam".
|
| There's also the fiction-based-on-a-true-story French movie
| Carbon from 2017.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| this is just the tip of the iceberg in carbon credit folly
|
| there is no unified carbon credit, they are issued just like
| cryptocurrencies, with 'accrediting organizations' based on
| nothing. very lucrative, same sentiment pumping them. amusing
| goal of selling them to a polluter in 2030.
| immibis wrote:
| This gives me an idea: Carbon credit crypto currency. You know
| it's good because it's alliterative. Also, no cryptocurrency
| ever turned out to be a scam.
| Sabinus wrote:
| Carbon trading is never going to work. Carbon tax now.
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