The warring conmen at the heart of a €5B carbon trading scam | Hacker News Reader

The warring conmen at the heart of a €5B carbon trading scam

theguardian.com

46 pointselorant14 comments

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.

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."

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.

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!

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.

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.

In Australia we had (for a brief moment) a carbon tax. It was mercilessly vilified by the Murdoch press who aided and abetted one of the darkest periods of Australian political life in decades, and resulted in the downfall of a government.

"The ill-fated Australian carbon tax lasted just two years. ... Emissions dropped almost immediately after it was introduced as businesses moved to technologies that emitted less. That price signal had an impact. When it was dumped in 2014, carbon emissions began to rise again almost immediately."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/carbon-tax-has-come-b...

> price is the cost of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere again

It's actually interesting not only because it encourages people not to emit carbon, it also encourage research for CO2 scrubber. If the price is attached to the current cheapest mass CO2 extractor then those people will be incentivized to have it even cheaper.

Like another comment said this would only serve to limit demand and incentivize a more rapid shift to get off of oil's teet. The industry probably would fight hard against this and win.

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.

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.

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.

you already missed the carbon credit crypto cycle 3 years ago

but it can be resurrected, memories are very short there, and greenwashing makes the gen z crypto traders feel good

Carbon trading is never going to work. Carbon tax now.

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