I finally stopped buying carbon offsets after seeing a project in Oregon that was just a normal tree farm

Has anyone else found that a lot of these 'climate action' investments are just regular business with a green label?

4 comments

4 Comments

The Gold Standard certification actually requires projects to prove they wouldn't happen without the carbon money. I looked into a cookstove program in Rwanda last year that was pretty solid. It's true there are bad ones, but the answer is better checks, not giving up. My company switched to a provider that lets you see the exact project and its reports.

theas281mo ago

Glad to hear some projects are doing it right.

angela_morgan10d ago

Yeah, I guess. But even with better checks like @kimw57 mentioned, it still feels like greenwashing a lot of the time. Hard to take any of it seriously when the whole system is basically built on trust.

dereks111mo ago

Okay, so your company switched to a provider with more details. I mean, that's good, but how do you even check the reports? I tried reading one once and it was just pages of jargon. Idk, maybe it's just me, but if you need a degree to tell if a project is real, that feels like a problem. How do you know the checks they talk about are actually happening on the ground and not just on paper?