"As major corporations look to buy carbon credits to offset emissions, critics are questioning the value of “legacy” credits from green projects that are a decade or more old. What’s needed, experts say, is to reform the credit system so it delivers actual carbon reductions. "
"On October 20 last year, French oil giant Total docked a tanker loaded with Australian liquefied natural gas at the port of Dapeng in southern China. The company boasted that the LNG was “carbon neutral” because the emissions from burning it had been neutralized by carbon credits purchased from a 10-year-old wind farm in northern China. Environmentalists cried foul. “Handing out money to a decade-old project that will run anyway does nothing to neutralize pollution from continued use of fossil fuels,” tweeted Sam Van den plas, policy director of Carbon Market Watch, a Brussels-based nonprofit.
Four weeks later another European oil major, Royal Dutch Shell, delivered another tanker-load of LNG to a port in Taiwan. It too was labeled “carbon neutral,” thanks to the company’s investment in forest projects in Ghana, Indonesia, and Peru that date back more than a decade, raising further questions about the environmental value of purchasing such “legacy” carbon credits.
The practice of dirty industries offsetting their carbon emissions by purchasing carbon credits has long been disparaged by some environmentalists as a fig leaf to cover business-as-usual that rarely delivers real gains for the atmosphere. Yet these credits are suddenly back in vogue, as U.S. and global corporations respond to new climate policies from the Biden administration and mounting calls for corporate action to slow global warming. This month, The Wall Street Journal reported that the American Petroleum Institute will endorse carbon pricing, which will likely lead to giants such as ExxonMobil buying carbon credits in the future. Meanwhile, the world’s airlines have agreed that beginning this year they will cover any further increases in their emissions with carbon offsets."
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