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He echoed an idea I heard again and again from proponents of this concept: Even hundreds of attempts across the world had not given forest preservation offsets a meaningful chance to work. “If we had enough money, it could probably help a lot.” It’s “the worst possible idea - except for everything else,” said Timothy Searchinger, a Princeton researcher who studies land use and climate change. While we’re sitting here counting carbon and moving it around, more CO₂ keeps accumulating in the atmosphere, he said. “Offsets themselves are doing damage,” said Larry Lohmann, who has spent 20 years studying carbon credits. Highway BR-364 in the city of Rio Branco, with a logging company on one side and a lake on the other. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last. In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Four years later, only half the project areas were forested. I enlisted a satellite imagery analysis firm to see how much of the forest remained in a preservation project that started selling credits in 2013. I looked at projects going back two decades and spanning the globe and pulled together findings from academic researchers in far-flung forest villages, studies published in obscure journals, foreign government reports and dense technical documents. For the airline industry and industrialized nations in the Paris climate accord, offsets could be a cheap alternative to actually reducing fossil fuel use.īut the desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven’t - and won’t - deliver the climate benefit they promise. What if Chevron or Shell or Phillips 66 could offset some of their damage by paying Brazil not to cut down trees? The state is the second-largest carbon polluter in America, and its oil and gas industry emits about 50 million metric tons of CO₂ a year. Whatever they release theoretically would be offset, or canceled out, by the rainforest.įive thousand miles away in California, politicians, scientists, oil tycoons and tree huggers are bursting with excitement over the idea. If the carbon in these trees could be quantified, then Acre could sell credits to polluters emitting clouds of CO₂. But that invisible process holds the key to a massive flow of cash into Brazil and an equally pivotal opportunity for countries trying to head off climate change without throwing their economies into turmoil. “There is a flow of water going up that stem, and there is a flow of sap coming down, and when it comes down it has carbon compounds,” he said. Brown placed his hand on a spindly trunk, ordering me to follow his lead. “This is an example of hope,” he said, as we stood behind his office at the Federal University of Acre, a tropical campus carved into the Amazon rainforest.
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But for geochemist Foster Brown, it’s the center of the universe, a place that could help save the world. RIO BRANCO, Brazil - The state of Acre, on the western edge of Brazil, is so remote, there’s a national joke that it doesn’t exist.