Danny Cullenward: Here we have the Environmental Defense Fund and Conservation International opposing a California bill that would require the offsets industry to make accurate marketing statements. Because truthful advertising would stifle investment. Think about that. subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2024...

Here we have the Environmental Defense Fund and Conservation International opposing a California bill that would require the offsets industry to make accurate marketing statements. Because truthful advertising would stifle investment. Think about that. subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2024...

POLITICO Pro: Environmental groups issue floor alert against Limón offset billsubscriber.politicopro.com

The bill in Senator Limón's SB 1036, which would clarify how California's existing false advertising law applies to the carbon offsets industry.

leginfo.legislature.ca.gov

A similar bill passed the California legislature last year without opposition, but was vetoed by Governor Newsom, who called for a rollback in state consumer protection laws specifically for the carbon offsets industry. I wrote about that for @heatmap.news here.

Gavin Newsom Is Weaker on Climate When the Cameras Aren’t Rollingheatmap.news There’s a growing disconnect between the governor of California’s words and actions.

EDF and other groups that promote offsets, like Conservation International, quietly lobbied against both bills. Now they are finally going public in their opposition.

Both EDF and Conservation International receive significant funding from the Bezos Earth Fund, which reportedly organized a meeting to lobby another grantee, the Science Based Targets initiative, to drop its opposition to carbon offsets — and to end run a staff consultation focused on the evidence.

The Bezos Earth fund has pumped billions into climate and nature projects. So why are experts uneasy?www.theguardian.com Jeff Bezos’s $10bn climate and biodiversity fund has garnered glittering prizes, but concerns have been voiced over the influence it can buy – and its interest in carbon offsets

In their opposition letter, EDF and Conservation International call for voluntary, industry-led reform efforts instead of legally binding regulation. Not only does that approach not work, but the private standards body they prefer (ICVCM) has no plans to address low-quality carbon credits.

That is, of course, by design. As is the coordinated opposition by offsets-friendly environmental NGOs to repeat industry talking points. Good people work for market-friendly NGOs. But the donors set the agenda, and it shows. Now more than ever.

📌

He did what now??

It's all in the Heatmap essay. Email me for a copy if you hit a paywall. You might be even more surprised to learn that the state's climate regulator is helping the California Chamber of Commerce run interference on another key bill.

California Regulators Proposed Narrowing Emissions Reporting Lawnews.bgov.com The agency overseeing California’s first-in-the-nation emissions reporting law consulted with business lobbyists in a failed bid to significantly narrow the measure before it passed the legislature la...

Thanks, Danny. Honestly I'm not sure surprise is the emotion I'm feeling at the moment... 😞

Damn him.

@ghgpolicy.org It looks like the bill would require "negligible risk of reversal over a period of at least 1,000 years" for forestry and land use projects - which is a bar I have a hard time imagining any project passing. Is that your read as well?

No, and this is an important point. The bill would require *any* project that cannot meet this condition to make a one-sentence disclosure indicating that its credits are not physically equivalent to CO2 emissions. That is a true statement. No other restrictions apply.

Here's the language we're talking about, for others who are curious to see the details.

I appreciate that legal language can be tricky to parse, but I am 100% confident that when EDF and CI wrote a floor alert that implied SB 1036 would prohibit nature-based climate solutions that they did so knowing the difference between a prohibition and a disclosure requirement.

That is precisely why I'm so upset by this move. When policy details are complicated, all of us look to other experts for opinions and guidance. In this case the NGOs made it seem like the bill attacks nature-based projects when at most the bill requires a 1-sentence disclosure for sound projects.

Have more to say on this, but briefly, I have thought for a long time that the vast majority of the issue with offsets as currently envisioned stems from need to maintain a fiction that 1 ton CO2 avoided is *exactly* equal to 1 ton CO2 emitted.

Yeah, that's where I am these days as well. Would be fun to touch base about it. It's a lot easier to make and justify good outcomes when those outcomes aren't presumed to erase the permanent impacts of CO2 pollution.

I have an idea I've been mulling. Let's find a time to chat.

A ton is a ton, in time or space, except when it’s not, that’ll be $50, thanks

The attempt to treat interventions (i.e. offsets) in complex social-ecological systems as though they are commodities like barrels of oil or feed corn does not seem to be going well. We need to find ways to support reductions and avoided tons without pretending that they all work the same way.

Either voluntary carbon offsets are so janky that truth in advertising will kill the market (but then it shouldn't exist anyway) OR they are arguing that the offsets are fine but this will scare investors away from a legit market. If the latter then strengthening standards should solve problem, no?

The issue is whether someone "should" know that the offset is "unlikely" to be quantifiable, real and additional. That's kinda vague so I can sort of see the concern but that's where the standard comes in, right? Have a rock solid methodology that people follow and that's the defence.

So, if worried about running afoul of the law, that means either the methodology is not sound, monitoring and verification is poor or investor confidence in the above is not high and so the investment seems risky. Any of those seem like a problem. For them, I mean.

Timely paper/thread on NGO relationships... bsky.app/profile/gree...

2/ Carbon pricing as a key strategy for the climate establishment. All top 5 cooperators participate in at least one carbon pricing partnerships.

Always read @greenprofgreen.bsky.social ! I often have moments where things click into place for me such that I feel like I understand something new about climate politics — only to be reminded that Jess wrote about it in her first book, Rethinking Private Authority.

Rethinking Private Authoritypress.princeton.edu

Awww, thanks Danny!

It's true! Consider your academic theories VERIFIED

Yep. Sometimes the happy green mask slips off and it's clear we're not all working for the same things. But anyone who wants a livable future should be clear that 1) offsets are a polluter bait and switch and 2) EDF and CI provide green cover for the same old neoliberalism that's killing the planet.

Shocking, in a way. But in the grand scheme of things, it is not surprising that the "conservation industry" is behaving like many other industrial actors. #NatureBasedSolutions #Conservation

Agreed, though something about this stands out to me. Maybe that's because the conservation industry is on the defensive in this debate, which sounds different than the gospel of win-win "solutions" we hear from proponents arguing for offsets (rather than against regulation).

Thanks for this thread! Can you share a gift link to the politicopro article?

Sorry, I don't have one — but you should be able to download the EDF/CI floor alert via this link: subscriber.politicopro.com/f/?id=000001... (Truly bottom-feeding arguments here, just wildly inappropriate for "science-based" organizations to make)

I am floored.

Height of perversion this! Everyone wants "high-integrity" carbon offsets (as if that could ever be a thing) but the second CA offers to put a cop on the beat, the rest of the market says shhh, nothing to see here!

Here's my offsets cri de coeur from last year (Danny, speaking of where the hell is the FTC?): www.desmog.com/2023/06/22/w...

Will the Federal Trade Commission Lead the Climate Reformation?www.desmog.com As of last year, more than a third of the world’s largest publicly traded companies had set targets to reach net zero carbon emissions, up from a fifth in December 2020. But a dirty little secret lies...

This slow train to hell is run by profiteering morons.

Post