‘Big Con Game’: Corporations Sink Hundreds Of Millions Into Carbon Credit System On Already Protected Land

A large number of carbon credit projects are claiming to preserve land that is already being protected by Brazilian conservation efforts, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Over the past two decades, so-called “carbon cowboys,” people who set up carbon credit initiatives for financial gain, have launched land preservation projects across the Amazon rainforest, generating carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars and building a thinly regulated market valued at nearly $11 billion worldwide, according to The Washington Post. The Brazilian government’s anti-deforestation policies already safeguarded more than 78,000 square miles of land used for preservation projects before they were claimed for carbon credits, and 29 of the 35 internationally certified projects in the Amazon overlap with public lands, meaning a large percentage of carbon credits overlap with already existent conservation measures.

The estimated total value of the offsets sold by these 29 ventures is $212 million, according to an analysis performed by The Washington Post using annual market rates. Multi-billion dollar companies like Netflix, Delta Air Lines, Spotify, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Boeing are just a few of the major corporations that purchased these credits in order to offset their emissions.

Corporations like these also purchase carbon credits as a way of  improving their environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance, according to veteran ⚡Energy consultant David Blackmon.

“Most carbon credit trading systems amount to wealth transfer schemes designed to benefit the very rich elites and provide near-zero or absolute zero benefit to the environment,” Blackmon told the Daily Caller News Foundation