Is the ‘Legacy’ Carbon Credit Market a Climate Plus or Just Hype?
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.