News outlets are finally allocating resources to coverage of climate solutions, and most reporters are trying to get these complex issues right.
Conservative-minded reporters ate it up, and legitimate publications followed suit, drawing more and more outlets into the narrative until “a wide spectrum of the media…felt obligated to treat these issues as scientific controversies.” The result was a muddled public discourse that delayed climate action for decades.
This time, it’s not free-market fundamentalists who are contaminating public discourse but ideologues from the opposite end of the spectrum: those who see the market economy as the root of all evil and carbon offsets as a tool for perpetuating that evil.
If the Guardian/Greenpeace/SourceMaterial stories reveal anything, it’s that the climate challenge isn’t a simple puzzle with a handy answer key; it’s a wicked problem that makes COVID-19 look like grammar-school arithmetic.
Despite all of this, the overwhelming consensus among virologists, based on a clear preponderance of the evidence, is that the single most effective way to meet the COVID challenge is to vaccinate everyone who can be vaccinated.
But the stories above tell us to do exactly that with market-based NCS, declaring the entire approach flawed because it doesn’t magically fix the entire climate mess, and they’re not alone.
Instead, I hope to put these markets into perspective by showing how they evolved to their current state, how they’re continuing to evolve, and how that evolution addresses uncertainty.
If you want to check those rebuttals out, standard-setting body Verra published this rebuttal to the Greenpeace/Guardian story, while I wrote two rebuttals to a ProPublica piece two years ago – one here and another here.
Most reporters are trying to get this right, but I’ve seen way too many workhorses upstaged by prancing ponies over the years, distracting us from the work that needs to be done.
In part two I’ll offer a brief history of Natural Climate Solutions, and in part three I’ll introduce a framework for identifying science denial and see how this coverage fits into it.
To the first question: some companies may think they can buy their way out of reducing emissions, but they’ll soon be disabused of that delusion – in part because the price of quality offsets will rise, but also because emerging protocols for what does and doesn’t constitute carbon neutrality emphasize internal reductions.
This especially applies to projects that reduce emissions by financing Natural Climate Solutions , an umbrella term for a broad array of interventions that slow climate change by improving the way we manage forests, farms, and oceans.
In my view, most of the people trying to undermine trust in market-based NCS are doing so because they don’t trust the answer to the first question – or in some cases because they think we should use markets to punish oil companies instead of finance cost-effective mitigation.
Many of those criticizing market-based NCS argue that fossil-fuel emissions should only be offset through industrial Carbon Capture and Storage , which pulls carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
I see the mechanisms I’m exploring in this series as dominoes that we’ve been lining up for 45 years, waiting for the world to finally awaken to the enormity of the challenge.
Bottom line: if people want to argue that certain industries should only be allowed to use certain types of offsets, that’s their prerogative.
Natural Climate Solutions address some of the most vexing components of the climate challenge.
NCS, as we’ll see, can get us roughly a third of the way to meeting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree C target, but they were garnering just 1 percent of climate-related media coverage until 2018.
Media now cover NCS, but it’s often a blend of exuberant, unexamined support for nature and condescending dismissal of the financing mechanisms that enable it.
On top of this, the story came a few months after Ecosystem Marketplace published the 2019 “State of Voluntary Carbon Markets” report, wherein experts listed such naively positive coverage as one of the more dangerous developments of 2018.
Within NCS, they focused on a cluster of mechanisms and interventions called “REDD+” .
Unlike simple tree-planting schemes, which offer nothing in the way of accountability, verified carbon projects follow detailed methodologies that were developed through a public process of peer review and response.
Forest carbon project developers use uncertainty levels to adjust the number of credits coming from their projects and buffer pools to provide insurance against reversals from events like forest fires or incursions.
Carbon standards are in the midst of major updates right now, with new methodologies out for public consultation and new criteria for verifiers and validators, as well as new training regimes.
Racism, systemic poverty, the long-term effects of outdated policy – these are subjects that we’ve consistently failed to get our arms around.
The problems come when novelty distracts us from boring reality, or when the clear arc is a false narrative.
Some new scientific results come out, you talk to a scientist on the phone and ask them what they did, then you ask a few other people who know about the research if the results made sense.
Reporters blow single papers out of proportion, publish their own assumptions that the research doesn’t actually support, or plop a super-speculative headline on top of preliminary results.
Vox science reporter Brian Resnick wrote about the hype cycle in 2019, when he showed how an academic study on the behavior of lonely investors spawned a flurry of news stories on the perils of urban living.
As I mentioned earlier, the term Natural Climate Solutions entered the vernacular in a 2017 paper that examined a range of interventions – from planting trees to improving fertilizer management to revitalizing soil – that can be leveraged to meet the climate challenge.
The “findings” of that paper went viral, despite there being reams of immunity in the system.
To begin with, by the time the paper emerged in 2019, afforestation/reforestation was already a mature mitigation approach, and it was underpinned by carbon market methodologies that, as we’ll see in the next installment, had evolved through a long and transparent process of stakeholder review.
When the hype cycle turned to these mature approaches, the very transparency provided by the critical reviews that are the sector’s strength became a tool to use against it.
Both REDD+ and the larger suite of natural climate solutions have evolved substantially over the past 30 years, and they’ve evolved explicitly because healthy critiques drive evolutionary improvement.
But the pieces I’m addressing don’t offer healthy critique.
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.