buy a star¶

Purchasing carbon offsets is the equivalent of the "buy a star" scam. No matter how much money changes hands, no material progress toward carbon neutrality is made. Billionaires trade carbon credits back and forth, garnering praise for the purchases, while sales are ignored. https://t.co/rE4ToebhdY There is no central standardization for what actually constitutes a "carbon credit," with various certifying agencies maintaining basically no oversight at all: you basically just pay for a piece of paper that says you paid for that piece of paper. One type of carbon offset is measured by projecting the carbon capture of a parcel of forest, decades into the future. They might purchase land and plant a bunch of trees on it -- trees which will sequester very little carbon for the first several years of their lives. And again, there's no oversight that prevents that land from later being resold, those same trees being paved over for agriculture, industry, or urban development. The actual amount of carbon "offset" in this way could be a fraction of what was bragged about. That doesn't even touch on the hilarious ineffectiveness of these new growth forests that have no biodiversity, no stability, and are subject to their own ecological problems, like groundwater depletion, soil erosion, and increased risk of wildfires. And of course, there's also the outright graft, such as the holders of protected forestland selling carbon offsets representing the exact same parcel of land, or selling the "protection" of land that is already supposed to be protected from deforestation. It's all just a giant game the capitalists play, jockeying to win the most "green morality" points, without needing to divest themselves of the carbon-fueled economic system that empowers and elevates them to the top of the social hierarchy.