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Airwashing: The Fraud of the Carbon Market

Julio F. Campos


This article is dedicated to expose how the carbon credit market helps companies evade their responsibilities to the environment and the health of society in their environment.

Nowadays when a corporation talks about environmental sustainability the first results presented is the reduction in carbon emissions.

Although some of them achieve that reduction by moving to renewable sources but presenting only the results with higher reductions, not the whole life cycle, many use the carbon market to calculate their emissions reductions.

The principle behind the carbon market is simple, the company A emits X tons of carbon, the company B grow biomass that sequesters that X tons, generating carbon credits. Company A buys company B carbon credits and neutralizes its carbon emissions.

As exemplified by Dr. Katharine Hayhoe an interesting analogy to understand how this can be made is: Imagine that person A wants to loose weight and pays person B to go to the gym and loose weight for him. So, as A gains weight, B looses the same amount of weight and A can say that gained no weight at all.  

The obvious problem is that A still will have health issues for being overweight.

And the same applies to carbon market for one may forget that carbon is not emitted alone. Many other pollutants are emitted together, which causes several local/regional environmental and health issues.

Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of people die every year due to air pollution-related diseases, and many more get hospitalized for the same problem.

Therefore, no matter how beautiful their carbon numbers are in their sustainability reports, one must never forget to check the life cycle and verify how that carbon is reduced.

If the carbon market is the answer, then the direct consequence is that the corporation is only using an excuse to not address the local pollution problems that its productive process generates and as result its environmental and social health footprint are not being accounted for.
 

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