Carbon delicacies
... that I will refuse to buy
Last year I had the pleasure to attend a couple of rodeos. I’m not a bronco or anything like that, but our ranchers like to have a few horses with them when the youngest rides saddle broncs. Some of these rodeos attract people from afar, even from places as far away as Brazil. I met a few Brazilian mares and stallions. They mostly chatted about things that I don’t understand, such as farofa and the cerrado. But then they told a few things to reflect upon and I will share my reflections in a few short stories. Let me tell you one of these before the sun sets.
I’ve been familiar with markets for a while. There’s some great produce people trade there, such as apples and hay. I was really excited to learn that Brazil was building a different kind of market: o mercado de carbono. What would you be able to buy there, I asked? We got into a long discussion until I grasped what it was about. So apparently, the mercado de carbono is being created to trade carbon dioxide. Most of us still don’t know why we would need a new market for that, but we were even more stunned by the concept of that market when we understood that you don’t even get to consume what you buy there! No carrots, hay or apples to take home, even though they contain a lot of carbon. So what will people be buying there? Well, as it turns out, they will be buying entities that offset whatever other carbon they consume. So let me put that in a simpler way: while it is totally natural to eat carrots, some crazy humans have come up with the idea that carbon was consumed to produce those carrots and that needs to be offset. It seems pretty impossible to me to offset that same carbon: once the carrot has been produced, it will be quite a challenge to turn it into air! Yet that seems to be exactly what is on those people’s minds: they think that it is possible to offset the carbon used to produce the carrot by buying a certain amount of air generated by a forest somewhere else. No matter that the carrot has still been produced and that the forest would consume the same amount of carbon dioxide, regardless if it had been paid for or not. And then we won’t even go into detail how we would know that the amounts of carbon are the same. The trick is: imaginary accounting based on fundamentally flawed models, rife with unverifiable assumptions. Forests usually don’t get paid for the air in them, at least not whenever I walked into one.
I’d be cool with all of this if only certain mentally deranged individuals thought that such lines of thought were sane, and let all other people go on with their lives. But I now see signals that these deranged individuals may intend to make their insanity mandatory. Ever tried to ship a package, or to rent a car? Well then you may have noticed that those websites now all propose to make their services carbon neutral, which they did not a few years ago.
While this practice is voluntary today and while the proceeds are generally invested in green projects rather than just empty forest, there may exist plans to convert it to the latter. In the United States, a proposal [1] has been under review by the Securities Exchange Commission to create a new asset class called Natural Asset Companies (NACs). Such companies would be listed on the stock exchange as entities that would manage natural resources, subject to the condition that they adhere to principles of sustainability as set forth by the SEC. The proposal had no restriction on the former use of the land to be ‘managed’. For instance, National Forests could transfer their assets to a NAC. Per the proposed rule, the asset would be transferred in perpetuity. The NAC would then be managing these natural resources, even though the US Forest Service already exists to do just that. But even more frightening was the fact that the NAC would manage the assets adhering to an ever changing list of rules that would stipulate which set of activities would be permitted take place on that land. For instance, should the SEC have decided that wild horses, who have roamed the forest for hundreds of years, are toxic to the planet because they fart, then the NAC would have to round them up. Horrifying!!
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While it instills fear, the more important question here is what was driving the authorities to come up with such an insane proposal. Well, let me depict how this would have unfolded, if it had been approved. The initial funding for the creation of the NAC would have come from the ultra-wealthy, who then would have owned the NAC and by proxy, the national forest land. Restricted by the SEC’s limitations on activities permitted on the land, in close approximation the NACs would have done absolutely nothing, and therefore would have had minimal expenses. However, the NAC would have controlled vast amounts of forests and would have been able to sell the corresponding carbon credits, again for producing absolutely nothing. Even in the scenario of voluntary carbon offsetting, carbon credit sales would have turned the NAC into a gold mine. Let me reiterate that: the NAC would have made huge profits for selling ‘clean air’ that would have existed just the same if neither the NAC itself existed nor if it had received any payments.
Seems pretty obvious to me what has been going on here, right? We are literally talking about the biggest attempted financial racket of the century. Thousands of well-meaning citizens would have paid a mark-up on each transaction straight into the hands of the one percent of the one percent, for absolutely no value received. The proposal has meanwhile been withdrawn, but let’s all stay vigilant that it does not return, nor that any other form of carbon offsetting becomes more widespread. If individuals want to pay for green initiatives as a charity, they can do so without that being linked to other transactions. On the contrary, should we get to mandatory roll-out of carbon offsetting in some way, shape or form, then that would just mean a direct taxation of the masses by the ultra-wealthy.
If you thought that the SEC must have ‘considered’ all of the above when they were drafting the proposal, then I’m sorry to say the following: the SEC represents just one of many flavours of government bureaucrats around the world who are blinded in their folly that they are the ‘righteous left’ who will save the planet by teaching the nitwits elsewhere how to live. Yet in reality, they are not aware that all they are doing is to roll out a draconian agenda whose only purpose is to make the one percent of the one percent even richer. Boosting the ultra-wealthy’s already expansive privileges does not seem a left wing agenda topic to me … more on that subject will follow soon. But the sun is setting, and right now I’m much more feeling like eating carrots than telling you other stories.
I am just a horse, so carbon credits are wasted on me. But I do care for my wild friends and for sure, I care for my carrots! As long as we can, we need to stave the lunacy of a carbon credit economy off. If it means that I have to use my hind legs to kick some bureaucrats off of my land, I will.
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[1] https://www.sec.gov/rules/sro/sr-nyse-2023-09