Nature Conservancy investigating its own sales of potentially meaningless carbon credits By Ben Elgin on 4/5/2021
Carbon offsets are a key tool for corporations to meet climate goals.
SAN FRANCISCO (Bloomberg) Following concerns that it is facilitating the sale of meaningless carbon credits to corporate clients, the Nature Conservancy says itâs conducting an internal review of its portfolio of carbon-offset projects. The nonprofit owns or has helped develop more than 20 such projects on forested lands mostly in the U.S., which generate credits that are purchased by such companies as JPMorgan Chase & Co., BlackRock Inc., and Walt Disney Co., which use them to claim large reductions in their own publicly reported emissions.
Withers Ranch in West Texas.
Stepping out onto the timber-framed patio at West Texas’s Withers Ranch, coffee in hand, it’s hard not to be struck by the sheer starkness of the Davis Mountains, rising hundreds of feet above. The bottom of Madera Canyon curves down past the adobe house, with rock outcroppings pockmarking the slopes. The juniper and pinyon pines that dot the hillsides are almost assuredly hiding bedded mule deer and coyotes, maybe even a lone cougar. But the animals are invisible from the back porch in all but the twilight hours. Even driving up to the ranch itself, down eleven miles of unpaved roads, is an adventure, like driving across an African savanna, with montane grasslands stretching out to the horizon.