Carbon Farming’s Hot Air Won’t Cool the Planet
February 13, 2025 | Source: GRAIN
The year 2024 was a tough one for the carbon credit industry. Every week seemed to bring reports of a new scandal.[1] BBC investigations into carbon credit projects run by US wildlife conservation groups unearthed sexual violence in Kenya and wildly inflated claims of reduced deforestation in Cambodia.[2] The Washington Post exposed carbon credit developers in Brazil for illegally grabbing over 20 million hectares of public lands and German broadcaster ZDF uncovered what it called “one of the largest cases of fraud in the German petroleum industry” in which oil companies were using carbon projects in China that “only exist on paper” to meet their emissions targets.[3]
Perhaps the most embarrassing scandal for the industry was when one of its leading lights, Ken Newcombe, the former CEO of carbon credit project developer C-Quest Capital LLC, was indicted on fraud charges by an office of the US Attorney General over allegations of issuing millions of bogus carbon credits from a cookstove project in Malawi.[4]
The year 2025 could be even worse. Shell is under fire for using “phantom credits” generated by rice projects in China to label its natural gas “carbon neutral” and a Kenyan court has ruled that conservation areas used to sell carbon credits to Meta, Netflix and British Airways have no basis in law.[5] Meanwhile a carbon offset developer that sold credits to Hollywood stars and US billionaires under the motto “Clean rich is the new filthy rich” is now under investigation by the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.[6]