++Ukraine is trying to bring the costs of its war home to Russia. +
++This week, at least two drones have struck a skyscraper in Moscow, a sign that Ukraine is increasingly willing to take the war directly to Russia. +
++The building, which houses some government ministry offices, was initially damaged in a Sunday drone hit before a second on Tuesday. Russian defense officials accused Ukraine of perpetrating both, and said that both drones were “jammed” before crashing into the exact same skyscraper. Russian defense officials also said they intercepted two other drones outside Moscow overnight Tuesday, following a similar drone attack on Sunday in Moscow’s business district. On Thursday, regional authorities in Russia claimed it had shot down six Ukrainian drones outside of Moscow. +
++Ukraine has tended to be pretty coy regarding these kinds of attacks on Russian soil, but it was a bit more open about suggesting responsibility for the incidents earlier this week. “Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centers and military bases, and this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address Sunday while avoiding outright ownership of the attack. In the aftermath of the apparent attack on Tuesday, Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelenskyy, echoed that sentiment: “#Moscow is rapidly getting used to a full-fledged war, which, in turn, will soon finally move to the territory of the ‘authors of the war’ to collect all their debts …” +
++Ukraine probably isn’t being quite as shy about this drone attack because it wants to send a message, and it wants Moscow to know who sent it. Ukraine is trying to raise the cost of war, and to make it more visible to the Russian people, particularly the elite and the establishment, who’ve largely been insulated from the consequences of Russia’s invasion. +
++“By bringing the war home to this business district in Moscow, of course, Ukraine makes the point that, well, life may go on in most of Russia, but Russia is at war, it’s a war Russia started — and the Putin government isn’t able to insulate its population or key elements of its population from the effects of the war,” said Niklas Masuhr, a military analyst at the Center for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. +
++The Ukrainian drones did not initially appear to do great damage or cause serious harm to civilians, but Ukraine is raising the specter that it could. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov said Tuesday that the attacks were “a clear threat” and that measures are being taken to improve defense near the capital. But for the most part, Russian officials have downplayed the attacks. This is a bit of a repeat of what happened in May, after drones entered Moscow, including one that targeted the Kremlin. +
++Ukraine did not take public responsibility for that drone event, but Vladimir Putin largely framed it as Kyiv retaliating against Russia for its strategic missile strikes — that is, Ukraine was lashing out, which in Moscow’s view did not warrant a Russian escalation beyond what it was already doing. +
++What is different about this time is Kyiv is hinting that reaching inside Russia may become part of its wider strategy to counter the Kremlin. It’s not clear how much influence that will have on Russia, or on the battlefield and Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive. But messaging matter in war, and Ukraine is not being nearly as cagey about these attacks. +
++“The shiny face of business-friendly Moscow, open to the world, has been attacked, and the Russians couldn’t do anything about it. That’s very valuable as a symbol,” said Simon Schlegel, a senior analyst for Ukraine with the International Crisis Group. +
++A message to Moscow amid a contested counteroffensive +
++Ukrainian strikes or sabotage on Russian territory are nothing new. Kyiv has carried them out throughout the war, though they have tended to be in parts of Russia closer to the border with Ukraine, or in Russian-held Ukrainian territory, like Crimea. Favored targets include military bases, air fields, oil depots, rail lines, and other infrastructure and logistic hubs that allow Russia to wage its war. +
++Ukraine has mostly avoided taking direct responsibility for these attacks, staying quiet rather than celebrating any Russian setbacks. As one Ukrainian official said last year: “We don’t say yes and we don’t say no.” This strategic ambiguity, so to speak, is partly because these attacks are audacious and risk potential escalation with Moscow. Also, if Ukraine used any Western weapons to carry out these strikes, it could feed Putin’s narrative that the threat of NATO is fueling his Ukraine invasion. The US and its allies have, in the past, also indicated they do not want to enable or encourage Ukraine to hit within Russia. +
++These recent drone strikes in Moscow are more about optics than directly targeting Russia’s war logistics. But, of course, Russia is able to carry on this war because its public, and its elites, are insulated from the pain of it. It’s hard to know exactly what the Russian population thinks of the so-called special military operation, but it does seem that the majority support it, or at least aren’t actively opposed to it. That has flagged at moments when the war has been made real — think Putin’s mobilization effort last year, which prompted protests and people fleeing en masse. The Wagner rebellion also showed that Russian politics are not fully protected from battlefield setbacks. A few Moscow visits from Ukrainian drones pierces that armor, too. +
++The drones used in these attacks also seem to be homegrown, and a New York Times analysis found that Ukrainian-made models were used in these strikes on Moscow. Kyiv is scaling up its drone fleet, and this is a way to show it is investing in, developing, and expanding its own military capabilities amid war. +
++Federico Borsari, a Leonardo fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), said that in some ways, Ukraine is mirroring what Russia has done, which is use drones — like those the Kremlin has purchased from Iran — to carry out attacks in Ukraine and penetrate Kyiv’s air defense systems. Russian drones have been used in recent attacks on a grain silo in Odesa and a critical river port on the Danube, which Ukraine will rely on to export agricultural products now that the Black Sea routes are effectively blockaded again. +
++“Ukraine is trying now to build the same type of capabilities — a cheap, long-range attack capability to target Russian objectives, deplete Russian air defenses,” Borsari said. +
++“It hasn’t the numbers yet to conduct this kind of attack at scale,” he added. “But I think, with time, we will see an increasing of this attack, and we will see more large-scale drone attacks by Ukraine against Russian targets, whether they are industrial complexes or military bases and the like.” +
++It seems unlikely that these recent drone attacks will fully change Putin’s calculus about the war, but it does communicate to Russia that Ukraine can increasingly strike Russian targets. That may force Russia to expend resources to try to protect different assets within Russia, which could stretch its military capabilities, especially as Ukraine wages its counteroffensive, which has shifted into a much more attritional conflict yet again. +
++From Ukraine’s perspective, a greater ability to wage war and defend itself is a success, one that Ukrainian officials are likely as happy to sell at home as they are eager to let Moscow know. “It’s not a silver bullet for winning the war,” said Borsari. “But this demonstrates that Ukraine could really integrate, and can use proficiently, all kinds of technology.” +
++Hint: Ask the publishing companies. +
++If you’ve listened to music over the past 35-plus years, you’ve probably noticed that some of the songs you’re streaming from your smartphone sound a lot like the songs that roared out of previous generations’ record players and car radios. +
++For Gen X (and some older millennials), this sort of thing has happened before. An obvious example is “Mo Money Mo Problems” by The Notorious B.I.G. featuring Mase and Puff Daddy. The 1997 hit contains a sample and an interpolation of Diana Ross’s 1980 Billboard hit “I’m Coming Out.” +
++Around the same time, Puffy (as he was known then) also sampled The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” for “I’ll Be Missing You.” And Will Smith dropped “Men in Black,” which basically lifted all of Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots.” +
++But nearly 25 years later, Pitchfork’s contributing writer and editor Jayson Greene says what’s old has become new all over again. “Some very business-savvy people have spotted that the value of well-known intellectual property in pop music has been skyrocketing,” he says. “And they have bought up with their significant holdings and power a huge portion of most of what American listeners consider to be the most beloved pop music and pop songs of the past 50 to 100 years.” +
++Greene points to recent examples like the rapper Yung Gravy, who recently scored a breakout hit with the song “Betty (Get Money)” by repurposing the chorus of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up,” as well as pop stars Britney Spears and Dua Lipa, who each recycled portions of Elton John’s music for their own singles. +
++For some greater understanding of this trend, Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Greene on Vox’s daily news explainer podcast. Read on for a partial transcript of the conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, and listen to the full conversation wherever you find podcasts. +
++
+Jayson, how is what’s happening now with artists like Yung Gravy different from what Puffy or Will Smith were doing in the ’90s? +
++What’s different — and this is a crucial, not an academic difference at all — is who is the person behind the music. +
++Puff Daddy was doing that work. Yes, he was sort of looking at his pop music factory as a hit factory, you know, like many super producer entrepreneurs of yore. But he was ultimately still a producer. While he blurred the line between being a CEO and a creative — he was on stage, he was a performer, he was in the music videos — it was his creative decision to take these beloved songs and remake them. +
++Sure. But he was still borrowing and trading on well-known songs, right? +
++Yes. But again, it was his decision. So for a thought experiment, imagine that it actually went that some other guy that no one in the world who listens to music has ever heard of because he’s vice president of whatever at some record company pulls Puff Daddy aside and says, “Hey, listen, we need you to sample ‘I’m Coming Out’ because our company just acquired this and we need you to take this and use it. But don’t mess with it too much because if you do, we won’t get as big of a payout.” +
++So this is a very intentional business strategy seeping into the creative process. +
++One of these music publishing companies that has sort of been at the forefront of this extremely aggressive and very novel and new technique of guarding over your corporate property, your intellectual property, is a company called Primary Wave. +
++Now, Primary Wave — and this is crucial to this story — they are not people who came from music publishing. Music publishing has historically been an extremely dry and sleepy area of the music business. No one was looking to shake it up. You were just there to sign a piece of paper. But these people at Primary Wave came from the late ’90s world of major label CD market boom. They are ex music managers. +
++Larry Mestel, the CEO and founder, Justin Shukat, the president, and later on, a guy named Adam Lowenberg who worked with Avril Lavigne and helped break her in — these three guys left Arista Records in the late ‘90s, roughly when Carlos Santana’s Supernatural sold 10 million records, right? +
++This is still a time when major labels were just printing money and recording their highest ever grosses, and these people were behind the helm. But these people, as they saw the music industry was cratering around them, at least as they had known and built it. And then Napster hits. It was the first shock wave. It was roughly around this time that Mestel, Shukat, and Lowenberg gathered together and formed a music publishing company called Primary Wave. They ended up at the forefront of a lot of what has now become super commonplace, and that is they’ve acquired the rights to massive artist’s catalogs that they then own either a piece of or 100 percent of, depending. +
++Many of them are catalogs by artists who are deceased. In some ways they have a more efficient way of maneuvering because there is no living artist in the room with them to talk to them about what they think they should be doing with their catalog. To that end, their first big purchase that they made headlines with was the catalog of Kurt Cobain. +
++But what do they do with it? Because I haven’t heard, like, a Kurt Cobain hook in a Dua Lipa song yet. +
++This is where this new mentality that the Primary Wave guys are bringing into the industry comes into play. They say, “No. We’re gonna monetize this. We’re gonna work this catalog,” as if they were artist development A&Rs. +
++Over the course of the next decade, what they did manage to do was sort of plant the seeds for and help stoke the fires of and arrange the meetings around the documentary Montage of Heck, which was this very impressionistic piece of sort of biographical docudrama that was largely based on the fact that there was this treasure trove of home recordings. They’re trying to basically invent a biopic as the rights holders to their publishing. No one’s even dared to think this audaciously. +
++Are there other examples of how they’re repurposing these catalogs? +
++While Montage of Heck is being developed, they test out some other pretty big moves. The one that Adam Lowenberg was most proud to tell me about was this campaign they devised in 2009 around Aerosmith’s “Dream On” which is, you know, the proto power ballad. It’s the first lighter-waver song arguably in rock history, up there with “Stairway to Heaven.” Iconic. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows it within 10 seconds. They surmised in their sort of pitch meeting that there’s something dreamy about thinking you win the lottery, and they want to stoke that. So they approach lottery vendors. +
++I can’t imagine in the history of music publishing that any pop music catalog owner had ever approached the lottery vendor before for a meeting ever. But they basically approach a lottery vendor and say, “Hey, we have this idea for Massachusetts, which is Aerosmith’s home state, we want to run an Aerosmith-themed lottery campaign. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to brand it with our logo. And when you scratch off, the lyrics to this song that we own is going to be on the card.” And then when you promote this campaign on radio stations to get people to buy tickets, guess what? You can play “Dream On” on it. +
++This was a genius move from a marketing standpoint because it meant they collected revenue streams on the two different ways that you can own rights to a song. The minute those words appear on the lottery ticket, a check — ka-ching — goes to Primary Wave and then they get paid again when the song appears in the campaign. It’s a massive success and it ends up spreading to 10 different states. This is when I think the big money green light bulb went on over all of their heads. +
++Is this sort of thing that music publishing companies are doing good or bad for music? +
++On its face, there is nothing inherently evil with a company trying to make money for the intellectual property that they hold, right? I think that there’s something suffocating in the current way that this is happening because I think that when the proverbial suits look after everything but the creative side are in the creative process, I think it’s rare that that’s good for the music or the art. I think that there’s always this complicated symbiosis between people like Justin Shukat and, you know, someone like Otis Redding. +
++But I think broadly speaking, it’s just not great for creativity as a sort of pursuit, as a muse, when the stuff that people use in pop music, which is the catalog, right — they reference the catalog either directly or indirectly, whether through sampling or inspiration — when you have people who are so closely guarding those songs as if they were a big pile of jewels. +
++Let me play devil’s advocate for a second here. I do wonder if ultimately it’s good to be reminded how great of a song “Never Gonna Give You Up” was even if it comes at the cost of hearing it in some, you know, cheesed-up, mass-produced single. +
++I mean, I would argue that that song is very well loved. That’s the reason it was pointed to. It was chosen because they knew it was a song everyone already knew to the point of being sick of it. It would defeat their purpose in many ways if they were farming out more obscure stuff. +
++Cultural attention is not an endlessly renewable resource. There’s a finite amount of cultural attention, right? We only give our bandwidth to so many songs by so many artists. And it’s a very recursive place right now. It’s very empty. It’s very full of recycled air. So I can’t imagine that it’s a good thing, right? If anything, it makes people tired. +
++One final devil’s advocate-y thought: The Beatles were, in a way, repurposing Little Richard. The Rolling Stones were, in a way, repurposing all the blues that they had ever heard, right? +
++Mm-hm. +
++Beyoncé wrote one of the most critically acclaimed albums of our young decade, and it’s a lot of samples. And my favorite Billie Eilish song sounds just like a Weezer track from the ‘90s, you know what I mean? +
++Oh, yeah! +
++Is music always sort of throwing back? And is music always referencing and always acknowledging nostalgia? +
++Yes, of course. But what’s different now is that you have effectively patent trolls who are blocking access and hoarding resources. That’s not good. To me, this was a story about end-stage capitalism. Because these are also people who decided to stop working with living artists and mostly manage the affairs of dead ones. +
++They’re like, it’s too hard to make money off of living artists. So let’s transition and let’s work with the catalogs of ones that everyone already knows. +
++When you already own the catalog to the most beloved music of the past 50 years, your job is really easy. I don’t have to walk into a room and convince everyone that this new artist is great. Everyone already knows this stuff is great, and that’s why they’re there. +
++I think it can’t be good for new art. I don’t. +
++Carbon credits explain the hyper-financialization of climate policy. +
++The reporting of this story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. +
++Carbon offsets are suddenly everywhere. Long the domain of airlines and unimaginative bureaucrats, firms selling offsets have proliferated, promising a way for ordinary people and organizations in wealthy countries to fight climate change with the click of a button. These companies claim that emissions in the rich world can be canceled out by buying credits from projects that sequester carbon, often in poorer parts of the world. +
++Some of these projects plant trees. Others simply pay those who own trees not to cut them down. Others go further, investing in technologies that decarbonize everyday life, like renewable energy and landfill gas capture. What links them all is the claim that, by paying (usually small) sums of money, consumers are counteracting the emissions their activities generate, chalking up a minus on the global carbon ledger. +
++The ease and affordability with which carbon credits can now be bought can feel out of step with the urgency of climate change, and in the last couple years, concerns have been mounting that offsetting is little more than a sugar hit for the conscience. Some critics claim that the whole thing is a fraud, amounting to a “license to pollute” with no real bearing on the health of the planet. +
++As economists who care deeply about the climate crisis, we wanted to understand what customers actually get when they buy a carbon credit. We set out to follow the journey of a carbon credit purchased from the buzzy startup Ecologi by Al Dix, a retiree from Yorkshire, England, who wants to take practical climate action. +
++The rapidly growing “financialized carbon” market +
++SALTAIRE, Yorkshire, England — +
++Al Dix is a conscientious man. Born in the shadow of World War II, the son of a well-known trade unionist, he was thinking politically from childhood. “Some kids go and play in the street when they are little. I folded Labour Party leaflets,” he says with a laugh. +
+/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24826203/Al_Dix_Decade_0301__CarolynMendelsohn.jpeg)
Photo by Carolyn Mendelsohn
++Dix shows us photos of a theatrical performance he produced early in the 1980s, lamenting the polar ice caps. He says he began feeling “helpless” about climate change in the 1990s. Now 75, he still sees little that he likes in policy or corporate behavior to address the crisis. But resignation is not his style. About a year ago he began researching ways to mitigate the carbon emissions his lifestyle generates, and started paying Ecologi $15 per month to offset them. +
++On Ecologi’s website, lush imagery of trees, rivers, wind turbines, and solar panels is paired with cute animations of the personal “forest” your money has planted. Each month, Dix receives a personalized statement outlining where his payment has been spent, usually in the Global South. This past January and February, it says, he planted eight trees, and through carbon credits purchased on his behalf, offset 0.75 metric tons of CO2 — about the monthly carbon footprint of the average Brit. +
++In the absence of adequate regulation limiting climate-warming emissions in affluent countries, personalized offsets of this nature have become big business. They form what is known as the voluntary carbon market (VCM): a decentralized space where people and businesses can choose to buy credits to offset their emissions. The market for these offsets, which is largely unregulated, could hit $50 billion as soon as 2030 and grow 100-fold by 2050, according to McKinsey. +
++Ecologi, since launching in 2019, has described itself as the “Spotify of sustainability” and received financial backing from the same venture capitalists who launched Airbnb and Stripe. Last year, it recorded annual revenue growth of over 200 percent. +
++Carbon offsets are traded in marketplaces like US-based Xpansiv, which offer real-time prices for different kinds of offsets — or, as they call them, “fungible environmental products.” These marketplaces facilitated the movement of 500 million metric tons of financialized carbon in 2021. Carbon is becoming high finance, with the likes of Xpansiv and Ecologi potentially set to become the Bloombergs and Wells Fargos of the climate economy — if financial industry incumbents don’t crowd them out first. +
++Early this year, JP Morgan’s Timberland fund plowed $500 million into carbon offsetting in pine forests in the US South. HSBC has been recruiting carbon traders since May 2022. Hedge funds are also expected to pile in as carbon prices rise and offset markets mature. +
++Recent revelations have cast doubt on these schemes. In January, a high-profile investigation by the Guardian, German newspaper Die Zeit, and journalism nonprofit SourceMaterial asserted that over 90 percent of rainforest carbon credits issued by Verra, the world’s leading carbon credit certifier, claimed reductions in deforestation that didn’t actually exist. As a result, they said, the credits were “worthless,” provoking painstaking rebuttals from the industry. +
++With climate change nearing a point of no return, carbon trading is not something we can afford to get wrong. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently warned that the 2020s were a critical decade to limit warming. If carbon offsets are going to be a centerpiece of global emissions mitigation efforts, it is important that consumers understand what they’re actually getting when they buy one — something that is, it turns out, easier said than done. +
++The journey of a carbon credit +
++Al Dix, for his part, doesn’t care much for financial speculation. He wants transparency. That’s why he chose to offset with Ecologi. Their friendly website, clear, direct impact on the ground, and openness about the inherent limitations of carbon offsetting appealed to him. “At Ecologi,” the website reads, “we believe that funding climate solutions is vital, but it doesn’t diminish your own carbon emissions — and should therefore be carried out alongside steps you take to reduce your own footprint.” But like many people, Dix worries that the whole thing might be smoke and mirrors. +
++“I’m aware of the fact that carbon offsetting is a scam in a lot of ways, for a lot of people,” he says. “It’s quite obvious that buying and selling carbon doesn’t really, actually, make much difference to the state of the fucking planet. Quite obviously. Because it hasn’t, has it?” +
++Still, he figures that it’s better than nothing: “I’d like to think that I give Ecologi my money, they contract people to plant trees, and that’s it.” +
++We leave Dix’s Yorkshire home on an unseasonably warm March day. A storm darkens the top of the valley where he lives, peppered with smokestacks and coal turbines left over from the region’s industrial heyday. Armed with Dix’s most recent carbon offset certificate, we are off to track the journey of a carbon credit. +
++Cooking for credits in Kenya +
++ABERDARE RANGE, Central Province, Kenya — +
++Here, between 2010 and 2017, a company called Carbon Zero Kenya, a subsidiary of CO2Balance, distributed 55,000 new cooking stoves to villagers. The Somerset, England-based company funds projects that create carbon credits, and then sells them to offset brokers like Ecologi. +
++By replacing traditional open fires with more efficient metal-and-concrete stoves, CO2Balance estimates it can halve the amount of wood required for a household. Under the rules of carbon accounting, this halves the emissions entering the atmosphere from cooking for every Kenyan villager who switched to the stove. +
++This kind of “carbon avoidance” is the crux of the carbon trade. It means that CO2Balance can create and sell carbon credits, representing tons of greenhouse gases that would otherwise enter the atmosphere, as long as they can distribute stoves and prove that they are being used. +
++The same logic applies to all carbon credit projects, such as renewable energy plants, forest conservation, and waste-to-energy projects. Companies account for these projects in different ways, but common to all is the idea of “additionality”: that they would not have otherwise gone ahead without the sale of carbon credits. In the Aberdare project, Ecologi says, carbon finance plugged a key affordability gap; the villagers wouldn’t have been able to afford the stoves without it. But it’s worth noting that, from looking at all of the project’s documentation, it wasn’t clear to us whether or how it accounted for other sources of emissions, like, for example, those produced in manufacturing and shipping the stoves. +
++In mid-2019, Ecologi bought a total of 535 credits from CO2Balance’s Aberdare project. In February 2023, they allocated about one-third of one Aberdare credit to Dix. He now owns the right to say he stopped one-third of a metric ton of greenhouse gases from being emitted. +
++But emissions reductions on the ground in Kenya don’t just become carbon credits in Yorkshire. To be bought by retailers like Ecologi, and sold to people like Dix, they first need to go through the Swiss Alps. +
++The certification game +
++GENEVA, Switzerland — +
++The Gold Standard Foundation offices occupy part of a squat white block, hemmed in by an overpass and drab apartments characteristic of Geneva’s northern suburbs. It’s an unremarkable but powerful location; the UN headquarters at the sprawling Palais des Nations is 10 minutes away by car. +
++It’s here that the Aberdare carbon credits were actually created, after Gold Standard received documentation from CO2Balance’s external auditor, Bureau Veritas, that the project was doing what it claimed. +
++Gold Standard’s certification requirements read like a mantra: certified, real, additional, independently verified, unique, traceable. They are backed by complex mathematics. The documentation for the Aberdare project contains several dense pages of equations, quantifying different kinds of gases over different time periods and under different conditions, all revised and updated each year by the verification teams sent out to ensure the project is still working as intended. Documentation for larger projects can run into the hundreds of pages. It’s all necessary, says Sarah Leugers, Gold Standard’s Chief Growth Officer, to ensure credits represent actual, tangible change. +
++She acknowledges the limitations. Carbon crediting is hard, complicated, and feels abstract, requiring a leap of faith that the equations and reports represent something real and all actors are working in good faith. When you really get down to it, it’s often an exercise in trust. Leugers echoes something we hear from practically every industry figure we talk to: “We can’t offset our way to a solution.” But she insists that carbon credits, properly and transparently administered, remain a vital tool in the fight against climate change. +
++“Let’s be honest. The voluntary carbon market only exists because there isn’t the political will to introduce a carbon tax economy-wide,” she said. If there were, “we wouldn’t need to exist. It’s frustrating that such energy is being used to criticize people doing something, when the people doing nothing are often let off the hook.” +
++As important as what Gold Standard does is what it doesn’t do. It has decided not to engage in what it sees as the murkier waters of carbon trading, where projects might have large downside risks or prolong fossil fuel use. Geoengineering is out, as is fossil fuel switching — when dirtier fossil fuels like coal are replaced with slightly less-emitting ones, like gas. Renewable energy, too, is now so cheap to provide that it’s unlikely renewables projects need to sell carbon credits to be viable. Most renewables projects, then, do not meet Gold Standard’s requirements for additionality. +
++This purist approach has limited Gold Standard’s market share. For Leugers, most critical is Gold Standard’s refusal to certify credits linked to UN-REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), the UN’s flagship climate change program, which supports almost half of all carbon credits issued globally. While Dix’s statements don’t include any such credits, REDD+ is such a huge part of the industry that it’s almost impossible not to talk about it. +
++The REDD+ program anchoring the carbon offset market +
++REDD+ works by encouraging developing nations to conserve or restore carbon-sequestering forests through financial incentives. This approach to carbon offsetting has been the subject of controversy in the industry because it relies on hard-to-verify assumptions that a particular stretch of forestland would be cut down if it wasn’t being protected by a paid-for carbon credit. UN-REDD+, along with Verra, the world’s biggest carbon credit certifier, was the focus of the Guardian’s damning reporting earlier this year. +
++This is why Gold Standard refuses to issue credits for REDD+ products, Leugers told us. They can’t be sure that the forests “protected” by the program would otherwise be logged. If a certifier gets this wrong, it would mean the carbon offsets sold to consumers, or to polluting companies like oil producers or airlines, are meaningless. +
++Mario Boccucci, head of the UN-REDD+ Programme Secretariat in Geneva, who shares the same office block as Leugers in this small, intense world, sees things differently. “I don’t look at them as controversies,” he says. “They are legitimate questions that have to be put into the right context.” He is frustrated that there hasn’t been more of an effort to comprehend what he sees as the benefits, emphasizing to us the acres of forests rescued by REDD+. +
++Verra, which certifies offsets generated by REDD+ projects and issues two-thirds of credits in circulation, sits at the center of the contentious rhetoric leveled at carbon trading from all sides. In response to allegations that offsets amount to greenwashing or are outright fraudulent, Verra’s then-CEO David Antonioli told us in March, much like others in the industry have, that carbon trading is just one small piece of the climate mitigation puzzle. +
++Antonioli insists that the Guardian’s investigation got it wrong — that the methods it used to discredit Verra’s credits, he says, “are comparing apples and oranges.” He’s probably right about the difficulty of evaluating such complex data. But if it is so difficult to explain that carbon credits have integrity, it’s equally hard to feel much confidence that these abstract instruments are shifting the climate dial. +
++This is obviously not an ideal situation — but the failure of politicians and the success of lobbyists on climate mitigation has gotten us here. If governments, particularly the US, had not balked at robust carbon pricing regimes in the mid-2000s, and if more schemes like the European Union’s Emissions Trading System or Uruguay’s new carbon tax had been implemented sooner, there would be no need for the private market, Antonioli said. He thinks new initiatives to create regulatory momentum in the private carbon market, such as the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, an independent industry effort to codify best practices, have come about five years too late. What is left is a patchwork of poorly regulated voluntary carbon markets. +
++Into the void created by government, corporate, and social inaction have rushed myriad players. Some are motivated by environmental concerns. Others, sniffing a quick, green buck, may not be. One large forestry corporation, which spoke to us on condition of anonymity, said it was considering developing a REDD-conforming carbon credit project on a piece of land it owned, but had never planted or logged. It was just sitting there, they said, and they realized they could get paid to keep doing what they’d been doing already. With a few consultants, some hefty reports, and a few years of back and forth with Verra, the credits could start flowing. The incentives, in this case, would be working precisely as designed. But it’s not most people’s idea of transformative climate action. +
++A humbler vision for carbon offsets +
++So, Dix in Yorkshire bought offsets from Ecologi in Bristol, who bought them from CO2Balance in Somerset, which paid Bureau Veritas in London to convince Gold Standard in Geneva to issue credits for emissions reductions achieved by Carbon Zero’s Kenyan stoves. The journey of a carbon credit is a long chain of financialization — of nature, of communities, of solutions. A price has been set for the air that we breathe. It feels like a rather abstract, roundabout way to save the planet, and Dix, at home on the muddy moors of Yorkshire, may not like it. Yet he does it anyway, and it makes him feel a little better. An imperfect response to a perfect storm. +
++Everyone we spoke to is adamant: offsets can never be the total solution or a get-out-of-climate-regulation-free card. But even this may be thinking about it in the wrong way. John Holler, a climate expert at the World Wildlife Fund, who used to work at Verra, says carbon trading isn’t really about offsetting at all. Instead, it’s simply a tool for routing money toward good things: low-carbon stoves, forests, community solar energy. “You’re purchasing carbon credits to contribute to global decarbonization,” he says, “not making a claim against your own emissions.” +
++A humbler, less satisfying goal. But perhaps a more honest one. +
++Angus Chapman is an Australian economist specializing in environmental policy. A former civil servant and long-time climate activist, his work has appeared in Vox, Overland, Arena, and the BBC World Service. +
++Desné Masie is an economist and journalist specializing in international political economy and sustainability. Her work has appeared in Business Day, African Business, the Guardian, International Business Times, BBC World Service, and Monocle Radio. +
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