The views expressed here are his and his alone, and they do not necessarily represent those of Ecosystem Marketplace, Verra, or any other organizations he is affiliated with.
You can’t fact-check a half-truth until its context is clear, and by then you may have followed 20 of them in a row, each taking you a half step from reality.
Nonetheless, I’ve found this taxonomy helpful because it emphasizes those fallacies most common to science denial and provides a framework for recognizing it — assuming you have the context to use it.
Once you’re done with this piece, I invite you to dig into the rebuttal to the Greenpeace/Guardian story that standard-setting body Verra wrote, the rebuttal I wrote to a ProPublica piece two years ago published after more questionable coverage this year, or one Permian Global Capital wrote after an especially shoddy piece in Nikkei in December.
Like the right-wing merchants of doubt who turned the strengths of climate science upon itself throughout the 1990s and 2000s, carbon market opponents are bending over backward to portray lively debate as something dark and sinister while ignoring the complex nature of the challenge we face.
It is a cornerstone of the impact analyses that government agencies and NGOs around the world use to see what works and what doesn’t.
They provide actionable models that work well enough until something better comes along, at which point we change – but only after that better way passes the same tests that the earlier ones did.
Logical errors are difficult to correct because, unlike simple lies, they unfold across pages and paragraphs rather than sentences.
That’s not a controversial statement, and most of the people developing REDD+ projects would agree with it – even if they disagree with Soares-Filho’s conclusions on REDD+.
It fills gaps that current policies don’t address and it financially supports policies that exist but haven’t been funded, among other things.
There could have been some value in unpacking this decades-old debate and breaking it down for a mainstream audience, but that’s not what Greenpeace did.
Greenpeace does this throughout the piece, where almost every opinion they agree with becomes a “finding” or a “revelation” discovered through an “investigation”, while every program they want to slam becomes a “scheme”.
The fountainhead of all their fallacies is the false dichotomy of offsetting vs reducing internally — the framing of offsets as a “license to pollute.” This is built on the premise that every offset purchased is a reduction not made.
Ecosystem Marketplace conducted an analysis of buyers in 2016 and found companies that voluntarily purchased offsets tended to do so as part of a structured reduction strategy, and plenty of executives have told me that offsetting acted as a gateway strategy.
Bloomberg, meanwhile, has run several pieces on a theme spelled out most clearly in “These Trees Are Not What They Seem,” which takes conservation groups to task for financing their operations through the sale of carbon credits – ignoring the fact that carbon markets emerged in part to overcome the short-term, fickle nature of philanthropic funding.
That may have been the case with the original Merchants of Doubt, but I don’t think that’s always the case here.
No matter where you categorize it, the meaning is the same: you magnify the minority when you give outlier ideas and untested findings the same status as ideas and findings that have passed the test of time.
I should emphasize that identifying a person or entity as a false expert doesn’t mean they’re bad people or all their research is flawed, just as even bona fide experts aren’t omniscient.
With that, I’ll turn to three papers that have gotten tons of attention in the past year, despite the fact that only one has been peer-reviewed and of the other two, one hasn’t even been published and probably never will.
It’s called “UN REDD+ Project Study,” and it comes from an outfit called McKenzie Intelligence Services , which Greenpeace and the Guardian hired to evaluate 10 carbon projects in the Amazon.
In the end, it was too embarrassing for even Greenpeace to release publicly, but they and the Guardian continue to cite the fake findings of this phantom analysis in their ongoing coverage.
A few notches up from MIS is a little outfit called CarbonPlan, which has produced a simple numerical rating system for grading the quality of carbon projects.
They do know marketing, and they’ve convinced a handful of reporters and technology groups that they’re the supreme arbiters of quality in carbon projects, despite the fact that their leadership is ideologically opposed to NCS and infatuated with nascent technologies.
They may be or they may not be; but if they really trust their approach they should write up a methodology and submit it to one of the carbon standards so that it can go through the wringer of peer review and public consultation.
I understand that the process of developing a credible carbon methodology can be tedious, and of course that also means putting your processes out there to be critiqued by experts and opportunists alike.
For now, I’ll turn to the second paper to get undue attention, although it does appear to be the product of honest inquiry.
Entitled “Overstated carbon emission reductions from voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon,” the paper looks at deforestation rates in several forested areas and creates “synthetic” deforestation rates to serve as proxies for what would have happened if the projects hadn’t come into existence.
It works not by comparing the impacted city or state to a similar unit but to a synthetic city or state modeled from multiple states, school districts, or other population centers.
Specifically, in constructing their synthetic controls, they excluded everything unique to the human impact on individual projects from the criteria they used to identify their synthetic forests.
The authors deserve credit for trying a new approach that may one day prove valuable.
Again, it seems to be an honest attempt to try and quantify impacts using available resources, and all honest attempts should be lauded.
Having built market-based Natural Climate Solutions up into something it could never be, some reporters are now tearing them down instead of digging into them and trying to explain them in all their glorious complexity.
They found reductions were deeper in countries with cap-and-trade markets compared to those with carbon taxes, even though the market prices tended to be lower than the taxes – contradicting a foundational CarbonPlan dogma that high prices are what matter in carbon markets.
Haites et al also showed that cap-and-trade programs become more effective as methodologies are updated, which highlights the importance of constructive criticism and the destructive power of turning the process of discovery upon itself.
All of these studies – and many more – paint a much healthier picture of carbon markets, but you don’t see market proponents running out and spiking the ball every time one of them comes out.
The methodology arose to prevent aggressive harvesting on thousands of small family forests, hundreds of which change hands every year, and it’s designed to lock those forests up under sustainable harvesting regimes for a century.
Unfortunately, the FIA didn’t have enough plot points to generate the degree of certainty required for carbon inventories, so CARB created “supersections” of forest that contain enough plot points to reach this.
The problem is that some of the supersections cover areas where one type of tree gives way to another type of tree, meaning that some parts will have higher carbon stocks than others, and some projects will end up getting credit for more carbon than they actually sequester.
They zoomed in only on those areas where they knew the anomaly would show up and found that some of the projects probably did get too much credit.
The authors back up their claims, for example, by pointing out that an inordinate number of projects end up barely achieving the objectives needed to turn a profit, which to them means the game is rigged.
Critically, they not only circumvented peer review but pitched their findings to compliant reporters rather than subject them to the slings and arrows of a population with the expertise to filter out the bunk.
None of this means these markets are perfect or that Big Oil is going to transition into clean energy without pressure from above and below.