For more than a decade, large polluting corporations (including the fossil fuel, agribusiness, and transportation industries) and financial brokers have tried to convince us that corporate and government-controlled “carbon credits” or “cap and trade” schemes can be a major solution to the climate crisis.
Many of the big players in the global financial elite claim that “carbon credits” or cap and trade practices can “cancel out” enormous quantities of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions.
However, by buying carbon credits that go toward financing climate-friendly energy conservation, reforestation, and other carbon-sequestering projects across the world, the world’s top corporate emitters of greenhouse gases are actually enabled to continue with their polluting, business-as-usual practices. Did you know that the world’s 100 largest corporations are responsible for 71% of current global GHG pollution?
Fossil fuel, airline, or pesticide and fertilizer companies apparently plan to keep on polluting as long as necessary to maintain their rate of profit. Therefore, they want us to believe that carbon credits are a type of voluntary or semi-voluntary “carbon tax” that will actually force them to clean up their operations and stimulate climate-friendly practices, especially in the Global South.
Although OCA has always opposed bogus carbon credit schemes, there is a new type of genuine “carbon offset” that is emerging, exemplified by the Hudson Carbon project in Hudson, NY, which is set up to pay regenerative organic farmers a substantial sum for scientifically verifiable carbon sequestration and ecosystem restoration practices.