REDD MONITOR • December 14, 2020
Last week, Bloomberg Green published a great article about The Nature Conservancy and how it became “a dealer of meaningless carbon offsets”. The article, written by Ben Elgin, looks into some of the offset projects run by The Nature Conservancy in the US. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has bought carbon credits from a project in Pennsylvania. Walt Disney and Chevrolet have bought carbon credits from a project in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And BlackRock has bought credits from a project in Albany, New York. JP Morgan, Walt Disney, and BlackRock claim that by buying these credits, they can offset their greenhouse gas emissions. “But in all of these cases,” Elgin writes, “the land was never threatened; the trees were already part of well-preserved forests.”