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Three years ago I entered this business as I saw some opportunity. After about a year I got out because everything there was fraud. F R A U D. >most of them ex

Three years ago I entered this business as I saw some opportunity. After about a year I got out because everything there was fraud. F R A U D. >most of them exaggerate climate benefits and underestimate the potential harm [...] >projects were categorised as “likely junk or worthless” due to one or more “fundamental failing” that undermines its alleged emissions offsetting power [...] Stop trying to disguise these operations as something else than fraud. These people made no "mistakes", this not a "sorry, we didn't know better" situation, they DID know. It is plain old pre-meditated fraud, the owners knew they were selling crap from the start, they lied about it, still lie about it and they get to profit off that. Edit: Funny, some invisible hand just moved my post from being the top comment for the past hour and getting lots of upvotes every minute, to the very bottom. I must be onto something here :).

RobinL 3y ago
Did you find any schemes where you were satisfied they were genuine? I'd love to know where I could donate money where I could be confident it genuinely had an impact
- moralestapia 3y ago
  There were a few carbon capture (CC) projects that were genuine, shoutout to the guys at AirMiners, they also have a great community and they're a pretty smart bunch of people. Downside of CC is it's still too expensive and current methods capture carbon on the order of kilograms/month where gigatons/month is needed. Sure, the tech will improve with time, and there's economies of scale, etc..., but a 10,000,000,000-fold change? Doubt it. Also, there's some fundamental physical limits that you'll hit way before you get close to that throughput. I wouldn't think of them as fraud though, as the people involved (usually) do not lie about what the current state of tech is. I'd say whatever shows reduction on carbon emissions is a legit thing; far from ideal, but the best thing we have atm.
  - dskloet 3y ago
    > Downside of CC is it's still too expensive Some googling suggests that it's $200 per metric ton, is that right? That would put the cost of capturing the world's entire footprint at $7T per year. That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing. Especially given that once we decide to do it, it will get cheaper quickly.
    - moralestapia 3y ago
      When I was involved in this, the real cost of capture, all things considered, was in the high thousands/ton. Climeworks, which is one of the companies trying to take this to a big scale, quotes it at 1,000EUR/ton. No one really talks about "carbon emitted while capturing carbon", though, as that would make the numbers MUCH worse. So, I don't think $200/ton is feasible now. Even if that were the price, 7T/year is like 10% the GDP of the whole world. That means everyone, literally everybody in the planet, people and corps., have to put aside 10% of their income for this to happen. Impossible. I was selling 10k/year commitments to companies making hundreds of millions/year and they were like "nah, we'll think about it".
    - psychlops 3y ago
      > That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing Sure, if you are spending other people's money, it's cheap. Pretty sure that once you commit to spending $7T per year the amount of fraud will increase dramatically.
monero-xmr 3y ago
Step 1 - buy something “full of carbon” or potentially “making carbon” (like a future cow farm) Step 2 - get paid for “offsets” not to do that thing that you never did
- unglaublich 3y ago
  Well, since you need licenses for those cows, which are limited in number, by not exploiting those (and also not selling those!) you _are_ indeed offsetting some emissions. (Given that the quota are not adjusted for unexploited licenses).
  - catiopatio 3y ago
    What countries require per-cow licenses, and of those countries, which ones wouldn’t adjust the quota upwards to meet consumer demand?
- panzagl 3y ago
  “Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”
- bloaf 3y ago
  I heard stories of companies like this doing things like buying old coal power plants that were slated to be closed, closing them, then claiming they had reduced emissions by 1 coal powerplant's worth. To give people an idea of what the kinds of fraud looked like.
pfisch 3y ago
Seems like planting trees is easy enough? What is wrong with projects like that?
- moralestapia 3y ago
  * Some people sell you a forest that was already there. * Some people will sell you a future forest that will never be there. * Even if we cover all available land with trees, it won't be enough. See, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.00058/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.00058... * Most of these projects are bullshit as well. See, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed... * There's an ongoing debate on whether or not forests are permanent carbon storage, because forests burn quite often and put CO2 back into the atmosphere very quickly. See, https://www.ft.com/content/d54d5526-6f56-4c01-8207-7fa7e532fa09 https://www.ft.com/content/d54d5526-6f56-4c01-8207-7fa7e532f....
- joshvm 3y ago
  It's complicated, but John Oliver did a good segment on it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0 Planting trees is not an easy solution. https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting-climate-change https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting... A major problem is that monitoring and verification is patchy. A carbon credit is in theory something like X ton-years, but there is no guarantee that what you pay for will be around in X years and policing us extremely difficult. X is traditionally 100 years. If I sell you a carbon credit and then cut all my trees down, what happens? Another is fraudulent sites - people selling credits for sites that already exist, we're already planned for protection, etc.
- michaelt 3y ago
  How do I know the new trees have really been planted, and that they haven't sold them dozens of times over? How do I know the trees will survive and actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than dying in a year or two? Which they might do, if they're planted on unsuitable but cheap land. How do I know that, in 20 years time, they won't have gone out of business and sold the land on to a logging company who turns it all into firewood? There's also a wealth of scammers who'll do things like "buy rainforest to protect it from development" when no development was going to happen anyway.
deleted 3y ago
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zpeti 3y ago
I'm just suprised most intelligent people never ever question all the research coming out of the climate science area. There is literally zero, zero, zero incentive to research or publish anything that might remotely suggest we aren't heading for some climate catastrophe. In fact you are likely to get banished from science if you ever question anything. In fact it's worse, the best way to get publicity and further funding is to be as dramatic as possible about what the future holds. That isn't reliable science. That's speculation at best, and fraud at worst. Many many other areas of this entire climate industry needs to be questioned.
dang 3y ago
> Funny, some invisible hand just moved my post from being the top comment Looks like a mod downweighted your comment, probably because it was a bit fulminatey and a bit generic. Those are inauspicious markers for an HN thread, which is why the site guidelines ask people to avoid them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Your comment wasn't terrible, nor bad enough to get a moderation scolding—though it would have been better if you had shared some interesting details about actual fraud!—always a popular and curious topic—instead of generic rhetoric about it. However, these markers are particularly bad at the top of a page, because the top subthread has a power-law influence on how the whole discussion ends up going. So when we see such a subthread at the top, we often downweight it, refresh the page, and then repeat the procedure until something more HN-salubrious is at the top. Actually this way of moderating subthreads is probably the single biggest thing we've ever hit on for thread quality.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- moralestapia 3y ago
  Nice and thorough explanation. The quality of HN content and discussions is indeed great, so I won't question the procedure. :) I honestly didn't thought of that initially and was becoming conspiranoic about what happened, lol. Thanks for the explanation.

RobinL 3y ago

Did you find any schemes where you were satisfied they were genuine? I'd love to know where I could donate money where I could be confident it genuinely had an impact

moralestapia 3y ago
There were a few carbon capture (CC) projects that were genuine, shoutout to the guys at AirMiners, they also have a great community and they're a pretty smart bunch of people. Downside of CC is it's still too expensive and current methods capture carbon on the order of kilograms/month where gigatons/month is needed. Sure, the tech will improve with time, and there's economies of scale, etc..., but a 10,000,000,000-fold change? Doubt it. Also, there's some fundamental physical limits that you'll hit way before you get close to that throughput. I wouldn't think of them as fraud though, as the people involved (usually) do not lie about what the current state of tech is. I'd say whatever shows reduction on carbon emissions is a legit thing; far from ideal, but the best thing we have atm.
- dskloet 3y ago
  > Downside of CC is it's still too expensive Some googling suggests that it's $200 per metric ton, is that right? That would put the cost of capturing the world's entire footprint at $7T per year. That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing. Especially given that once we decide to do it, it will get cheaper quickly.
  - moralestapia 3y ago
    When I was involved in this, the real cost of capture, all things considered, was in the high thousands/ton. Climeworks, which is one of the companies trying to take this to a big scale, quotes it at 1,000EUR/ton. No one really talks about "carbon emitted while capturing carbon", though, as that would make the numbers MUCH worse. So, I don't think $200/ton is feasible now. Even if that were the price, 7T/year is like 10% the GDP of the whole world. That means everyone, literally everybody in the planet, people and corps., have to put aside 10% of their income for this to happen. Impossible. I was selling 10k/year commitments to companies making hundreds of millions/year and they were like "nah, we'll think about it".
  - psychlops 3y ago
    > That's a lot of money but seems pretty close to worth doing Sure, if you are spending other people's money, it's cheap. Pretty sure that once you commit to spending $7T per year the amount of fraud will increase dramatically.

monero-xmr 3y ago

Step 1 - buy something “full of carbon” or potentially “making carbon” (like a future cow farm) Step 2 - get paid for “offsets” not to do that thing that you never did

unglaublich 3y ago
Well, since you need licenses for those cows, which are limited in number, by not exploiting those (and also not selling those!) you _are_ indeed offsetting some emissions. (Given that the quota are not adjusted for unexploited licenses).
- catiopatio 3y ago
  What countries require per-cow licenses, and of those countries, which ones wouldn’t adjust the quota upwards to meet consumer demand?
panzagl 3y ago
“Major Major's father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”
bloaf 3y ago
I heard stories of companies like this doing things like buying old coal power plants that were slated to be closed, closing them, then claiming they had reduced emissions by 1 coal powerplant's worth. To give people an idea of what the kinds of fraud looked like.

pfisch 3y ago

Seems like planting trees is easy enough? What is wrong with projects like that?

moralestapia 3y ago
* Some people sell you a forest that was already there. * Some people will sell you a future forest that will never be there. * Even if we cover all available land with trees, it won't be enough. See, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.00058/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ffgc.2020.00058... * Most of these projects are bullshit as well. See, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed... * There's an ongoing debate on whether or not forests are permanent carbon storage, because forests burn quite often and put CO2 back into the atmosphere very quickly. See, https://www.ft.com/content/d54d5526-6f56-4c01-8207-7fa7e532fa09 https://www.ft.com/content/d54d5526-6f56-4c01-8207-7fa7e532f....
joshvm 3y ago
It's complicated, but John Oliver did a good segment on it. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0 Planting trees is not an easy solution. https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting-climate-change https://e360.yale.edu/features/phantom-forests-tree-planting... A major problem is that monitoring and verification is patchy. A carbon credit is in theory something like X ton-years, but there is no guarantee that what you pay for will be around in X years and policing us extremely difficult. X is traditionally 100 years. If I sell you a carbon credit and then cut all my trees down, what happens? Another is fraudulent sites - people selling credits for sites that already exist, we're already planned for protection, etc.
michaelt 3y ago
How do I know the new trees have really been planted, and that they haven't sold them dozens of times over? How do I know the trees will survive and actually pull carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than dying in a year or two? Which they might do, if they're planted on unsuitable but cheap land. How do I know that, in 20 years time, they won't have gone out of business and sold the land on to a logging company who turns it all into firewood? There's also a wealth of scammers who'll do things like "buy rainforest to protect it from development" when no development was going to happen anyway.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

zpeti 3y ago

I'm just suprised most intelligent people never ever question all the research coming out of the climate science area. There is literally zero, zero, zero incentive to research or publish anything that might remotely suggest we aren't heading for some climate catastrophe. In fact you are likely to get banished from science if you ever question anything. In fact it's worse, the best way to get publicity and further funding is to be as dramatic as possible about what the future holds. That isn't reliable science. That's speculation at best, and fraud at worst. Many many other areas of this entire climate industry needs to be questioned.

dang 3y ago

> Funny, some invisible hand just moved my post from being the top comment Looks like a mod downweighted your comment, probably because it was a bit fulminatey and a bit generic. Those are inauspicious markers for an HN thread, which is why the site guidelines ask people to avoid them (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Your comment wasn't terrible, nor bad enough to get a moderation scolding—though it would have been better if you had shared some interesting details about actual fraud!—always a popular and curious topic—instead of generic rhetoric about it. However, these markers are particularly bad at the top of a page, because the top subthread has a power-law influence on how the whole discussion ends up going. So when we see such a subthread at the top, we often downweight it, refresh the page, and then repeat the procedure until something more HN-salubrious is at the top. Actually this way of moderating subthreads is probably the single biggest thing we've ever hit on for thread quality.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
moralestapia 3y ago
Nice and thorough explanation. The quality of HN content and discussions is indeed great, so I won't question the procedure. :) I honestly didn't thought of that initially and was becoming conspiranoic about what happened, lol. Thanks for the explanation.