The Carbon Credit Scam

Recent investigations have raised significant concerns about the integrity of carbon credit schemes, with findings suggesting that a substantial portion of these credits may not represent genuine emission reductions. For instance, a 2023 analysis ↗ reported that over 90% of rainforest carbon offsets certified by Verra, a leading carbon standard organization, were essentially worthless.

As always happens when big money is involved anywhere, the parasites move in and take over. Monoculture tree-planting schemes are threatening tropical biodiversity, and ecologists have warned that ecosystems like the Amazon and Congo basin are being reduced to their carbon value. A Trends in Ecology and Evolution article↗ has more information on this.

I could go on, but you get the picture. All over Africa and many other parts of the world, people are wasting time and energy running around with GPS apps on mobile phones, “tracking” the trees to fulfill the ridiculous conditions of the carbon offset grants. Making caring into a business was never going to produce anything good, whether in the world of “philanthropy” or carbon trading.

If we can get rid of the scammy middlemen (ultimately it’s all our money; they just have different ways of taking it off us) and sponsor people directly, we can achieve much better results at a fraction of the cost. Rusinga Island is a great example. The people there are reforesting their island, not because of some idea of compensating for pollution in some remote part of the world (impossible anyway), but because they know it will benefit them and their whole environment to do so.

The carbon offset grants are only a way to enable them to do it because nobody else will put up the money yet. If they were getting enough to set up their forests without that money, they could do it all in a much more appropriate way, without having to do silly made-up work and without being ripped off to make profits for “investors.”.

“How long does it take to make the woods? As long as it takes to make the world.”

Wendell Berry, “Sabbaths.”.

Carbon credits are a dehumanized, soulless perversion of the original intentions of the “environmental” and “aid” movements to create a better world for us all to live in. Direct sponsorship is a way to achieve our aims without sacrificing our personal human connections on the altar of corporate profits, which is all that the carbon offset business is.

As we give way to big government and big corporations, we lose a part of ourselves, our communities, and our connection to the living world. Corporate entities have no soul and should have no part in any activities other than business. Even then, we need to keep a close and wary eye on them. Now that we have the internet and bitcoin, now that we can interact with each other directly, they have no legitimate reason to exist anyway.

So, if you’re interested in making this change happen, please go to clickforcharity.net to make a start—no money needed! If you do want to make a regular commitment or irregular payments, like with the legacy charity business, we can help with that too. But it’s all 100% direct.