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Harvard set up worthless carbon offsetting scheme that sold millions of junk credits

Original article by Fin Johnston republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Project has sold credits to EasyJet, British American Tobacco and Ernst & Young

A carbon offsetting project set up by Harvard University’s endowment fund has sold millions of junk credits to major international companies, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) can reveal.

After establishing the scheme in 2012 on land it has bought in Uruguay, Harvard ended its involvement when it sold the land across two deals in 2017 and 2019 worth a combined $450m. But the project is still active today and has sold enough credits to have supposedly offset over 5 million tonnes of CO2 emissions – roughly equivalent to what a million cars would produce in a year.

EasyJet, British American Tobacco and Ernst & Young are all among the biggest buyers of credits from the project.

The current owner of the project told TBIJ it had received no revenues from sales of carbon credits to these companies. A spokesperson for the Harvard fund said it does not comment on individual investments.

The project was given the green light to sell carbon credits in 2012 by Verra, the carbon credit standards body. But in 2022 it was given a rating of zero by an agency that assesses the effectiveness of carbon offsetting schemes.

More from this investigation Tobacco giant’s ‘carbon neutral vape’ was offset with junk credits

The rating means that the credits, which should each represent one tonne of emissions avoided or removed from the atmosphere, represent no change. In other words, the project has had no effect on the environment at all.

The Guanaré Forest Plantations Project, a vast reforesting scheme, was set up following the 2006 purchase of an area of land in eastern Uruguay about the size of Washington DC. It was ultimately paid for by the university’s endowment fund, Harvard Management Company (HMC), a $50bn vehicle which invests to support research and student bursaries.

Though the land was bought through two companies set up by HMC, and the running of the project was outsourced to a Uruguayan forestry company, all the money made from sales of carbon credits went to the Harvard fund.

[section omitted: What is carbon offsetting?]

Carbon offsets allow companies to make up for the carbon emissions they create by paying to avoid or remove emissions elsewhere. Each carbon credit represents a ton of carbon dioxide either removed from the atmosphere or prevented from entering it in the first place.

Offsetting has been the subject of much debate. Some argue it is necessary and provides much-needed incentives for investors to channel their money into green initiatives. Others have said it offers polluting companies a way to avoid reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions.

The $2bn global market for carbon offsets has been hit by a number of recent scandals – with reports claiming that many credits do not represent genuine carbon reductions.

On day one of this year’s Cop climate talks in Baku, an early agreement was reached over rules around the creation of a global carbon market, in theory paving the way for rich countries to pay for cheap climate action abroad.

Among the project’s customers was British American Tobacco, which purchased 130,000 credits to offset emissions from its flagship product Vuse, marketed by the company as “the world’s first carbon neutral vape brand”.

The coffee company Lavazza also bought credits from the project to offset the emissions of a supposedly “carbon neutral” coffee capsule it launched in 2022.

Renoster, the agency that gave the project a zero rating, raised three criticisms of the scheme. The first hinged on a factor known as “additionality”, which exists to prevent companies from going about their normal business – for example running a commercial timber project – and selling carbon credits on top. If a project could run without carbon finance, then it cannot be considered additional.

Documents submitted to Verra state that the project’s objective is to create “high value” timber products. Renoster ruled that carbon finance had ultimately made no difference. “We believe that these trees were going to be planted regardless of the project,” it said.

The second criticism was that the scheme’s “baseline assumptions” were wrong. A baseline number is something given to every carbon offsetting project, against which its removals are measured. The project had a baseline of 0, meaning no emissions whatsoever would have been removed from the atmosphere if the scheme did not exist.

Renoster said that baseline was “not a reasonable assumption for the region” because large portions of nearby land were already being converted from pasture to eucalyptus plantations.

Renoster’s third criticism was that the project was unlikely to run its full course, which was projected to be 100 years.

“We do not believe that Guanaré’s carbon credits represent true emissions reductions,” Renoster’s chief science officer, Elias Ayrey, told TBIJ. “We would not consider carbon neutrality claims based on these particular credits to be legitimate.”

The current owners of the project said: “Carbon credits have been critical for achieving the rates of return that investors required when the project started.” They said this cash means they can let the trees grow for longer before they are harvested.

A second agency, BeZero Carbon, also assessed the project and raised similar concerns around additionality and baseline assumptions. It found that the project had a “low” likelihood of achieving the purported emissions avoidance or removal.

The project has also been criticised by World Rainforest Movement, an organisation that monitors the Uruguayan forestry industry, which said: “Industrial tree plantations in Uruguay have led to land concentration by a small group of corporations and investment funds. They replace an extremely important ecosystem – grasslands – to plant tree monocultures, destroying biodiversity and watersheds.”

A BAT spokesperson told TBIJ that its carbon neutrality claim was independently validated in 2021. Lavazza said it had removed the claims from its products and is dedicated to transparency in all its sustainability initiatives.

An EasyJet spokesperson told TBIJ that it transitioned away from offsetting in 2022 but until then “had robust due diligence processes in place”.

Ernst & Young said it selects offsetting projects which have been certified against internationally recognised standards and continues to work on its due diligence procedures. It said it retired all remaining credits in this project in 2023.

This story was updated on 20 November 2024 to clarify the response given to TBIJ by the Harvard fund.

Reporter: Fin Johnston
Global health editor: Fiona Walker
Deputy editor: Chrissie Giles
Editor: Franz Wild
Impact producer: Paul Eccles
Production editor: Alex Hess
Fact checker: Somesh Jha

TBIJ has a number of funders, a full list of which can be found here. None of our funders have any influence over editorial decisions or output.

Original article by Fin Johnston republished from TBIJ under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Continue ReadingHarvard set up worthless carbon offsetting scheme that sold millions of junk credits

UK sees privatisation ‘opportunities’ in Ukraine war

https://www.declassifieduk.org/uk-sees-privatisation-opportunities-in-ukraine-war/

Zelensky meets Starmer and NATO secretary general Mark Rutte. (Photo: Simon Dawson / No 10 handout)

British aid is being used to open up Ukraine’s wrecked economy to foreign investors and enhance trade with the UK.

Amid the devastating war in Ukraine, British economic aid to the country is focused on promoting pro-private sector reforms and on pressing the government to open up its economy to foreign investors. 

Recently-published Foreign Office documents on its flagship aid project in Ukraine, which supports privatisation, note that the war provides “opportunities” for Ukraine delivering on “some hugely important reforms”.

The government in Kyiv has in recent months been responding positively to these calls. Last month, president Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law expanding the privatisation of state-owned banks in the country. 

It follows the Ukrainian government’s announcement in July of its ‘Large-Scale Privatisation 2024’ programme that is intended to drive foreign investment into the country and raise money for Ukraine’s struggling national budget, not least to fight Russia.

Large assets slated for privatisation currently include the country’s biggest producer of titanium ore, a leading producer of concrete products and a mining and processing plant. 

Ukraine envisaged privatising the country’s roughly 3,500 state-owned enterprises in a law of 2018, which said foreign citizens and companies could become owners.

The process stalled as a result of coronavirus and then Russia’s invasion in February 2022. But hundreds of smaller-scale enterprises are now being privatised, bringing in revenues of UAH 9.6bn (£181m) in the past two years. 

“The resumption of privatisation amid the full-scale war is an important step, which is already yielding results,” Ukraine’s economy minister Yulia Svyrydenko said last month. 

Another law enacted in June 2023 allows large-scale assets to be sold to foreigners or Ukrainians during the current martial law regime.  

…

Article continues at https://www.declassifieduk.org/uk-sees-privatisation-opportunities-in-ukraine-war/

Continue ReadingUK sees privatisation ‘opportunities’ in Ukraine war

Sanders Says US Complicity in Gaza ‘Must End’ Ahead of Senate Vote to Block Arms to Israel

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), joined by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), speaks at a news conference on November 19, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

“The United States government is currently in violation of the law, and every member of the U.S. Senate who believes in the rule of law should vote for these resolutions,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders.

A group of U.S. senators led by Bernie Sanders of Vermont held a press conference Tuesday urging their colleagues to support resolutions that would block the sale of tank rounds, bomb kits, and other weaponry to the Israeli government, which has repeatedly used such arms to commit horrific war crimes in the Gaza Strip over the past 13 months.

“The truth of the matter is, from a legal perspective, these resolutions are not complicated; they’re cut and dry,” said Sanders (I-Vt.), who introduced the joint resolutions of disapproval in September alongside several other members of the Senate Democratic caucus.

“The United States government is currently in violation of the law, and every member of the U.S. Senate who believes in the rule of law should vote for these resolutions,” Sanders continued, pointing to U.S. statutes prohibiting the sale of weaponry to countries violating internationally recognized human rights or obstructing American humanitarian aid.

Sanders was joined at Tuesday’s press conference by Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), each of whom made their case to fellow senators ahead of a scheduled floor vote on Wednesday.

“What’s unfolding before our very eyes right now is mass starvation and the spread of disease,” said Welch. “Is the United States and its foreign policy… forced to be blind to the suffering before our very eyes?”

Surrounding the senators as they spoke were photographs of destruction and emaciated children in Gaza, where most of the population is displaced and crowded into small segments of the enclave as Israeli bombs rain down and famine takes hold.

Watch the full press conference:

The resolutions will hit the floor for a vote Wednesday with the backing of a broad coalition that includes Jewish Voice for Peace Action, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, J Street, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Oxfam, and other organizations and activists.

“For over a year, the Biden administration has funded the Israeli government’s brutal genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, despite overwhelming opposition from across the country,” said Beth Miller, political director of Jewish Voice for Peace Action, which said it has driven more than 56,200 letters and more than 20,790 phone calls to senators imploring them to support the measures.

“These joint resolutions of disapproval are one of the last chances that Senate Democrats have before Republicans take control in January to uphold human rights, honor the will of the American people, and stand on the right side of history by blocking weapons to the Israeli military,” Miller added.

“It is time to tell the Netanyahu government that they cannot use U.S. taxpayer dollars and American weapons in violation of U.S. and international law, and in violation of our moral values.”

Since the October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the U.S. has supplied its ally with more than 50,000 tons of weaponry and approved billions of dollars in additional arms and military equipment to be delivered in years to come. U.S. military support has helped Israel carry out a large-scale military assault on Gaza, killing more than 43,000 people so far—a majority of them women and children.

To sustain the flow of American weapons, the Biden administration has contradicted the findings of its own experts and outside analysts by declaring publicly that it has not found Israel to be illegally blocking U.S. humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, aid groups on the ground say humanitarian assistance has plummeted to an all-time low in recent weeks, with an average of just 37 aid trucks entering Gaza per day in October.

During Tuesday’s press conference, Sanders said the “most important point to be made” ahead of Wednesday’s vote is that “the United States of America is complicit in these atrocities.”

“That complicity must end, and that is what these resolutions are about,” said Sanders. “It is time to tell the Netanyahu government that they cannot use U.S. taxpayer dollars and American weapons in violation of U.S. and international law, and in violation of our moral values.”

This post has been updated to correct when Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced the resolutions.

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingSanders Says US Complicity in Gaza ‘Must End’ Ahead of Senate Vote to Block Arms to Israel

The Climate Finance Plan Leaders Won’t Consider at COP29? Tax the Rich

Original article by Sam Pizzigati republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Activists gather with banners, including one that reads: “Pay Up,” outside the plenary halls to voice their demands for a variety of climate-related issues, including labour rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights, loss and damage financing, and the expulsion of fossil fuel lobbyists from the conference on day six at the UNFCCC COP29 Climate Conference on November 16, 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan. (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

A global 2% annual tax on billionaire wealth could raise $250 billion per year from just the world’s 100 richest families.

The world desperately needs to pull the plug on fossil fuels. So agree most of the official delegates from nearly 200 nations who have gathered this month by the Caspian Sea for the 29th annual global “Conference of the Parties” on climate change—COP29 for short—in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku.

But not all the estimated 70,000 attendees at this year’s COP are practicing what they should be preaching. Private jet arrivals at Baku’s international airport, news reports note, have just doubled.

What makes that such a big deal? Practically nothing symbolizes wanton disregard for our Earth’s environment more dramatically than private jet travel. A corporate executive taking a single long-haul private jet flight, points out the Travel Smart Campaign’s Denise Auclair, “will burn more CO2 than several normal people do in an entire year.”

Instead of taxing the world’s wealthiest at higher levels, rich nations want to give their richest more opportunities to become ever richer.

Researchers at Oxfam have just gone through the flight records of 23 global billionaires. Those airborne souls averaged 184 private jet flights each over a recent single year. They each essentially circumnavigated the globe 10 times over. Their flights averaged 2,074 tons of carbon emissions, an outlay an average person globally would take 300 years to emit.

Extravagances like private jets help explain why global carbon emissions last year expanded by 1.3%. To get climate anywhere near under control, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres noted on the eve of this month’s COP29 extravaganza, the world’s nations ought to be reducing carbon emissions by at least 9% a year.

“The world is still underestimating climate risks,” Guterres added. “It’s absolutely essential to reduce emissions drastically now.”

And that reducing will only unfold, the U.N. secretary-general emphasized in his COP29 opening remarks, if the world’s nations address the pivotal contribution to climate catastrophe that our world’s wealthiest are making.

“The rich cause the problem,” as Guterres explained, “the poor pay the highest price.”

Observers have tagged this year’s global environmental gathering the “climate finance COP.” The key question before all the official government delegates gathered in Baku: Who will actually pay the bill for addressing the climate change crisis?

Back in 2009, national delegations to that year’s COP gathering pledged to raise an overall annual $100 billion over the next 15 years. The world’s nations have since then met that target only once. Any new annual target for the next 15 years, most researchers and activists agree, needs to run considerably higher, anywhere from $500 billion to $5 trillion higher.

No one can reasonably expect governments alone, COP principals from rich nations counter, to come up with anywhere near that level of support. These rich-nation COP delegations want to encourage private investors to get more involved in financing new climate initiatives.

In other words, instead of taxing the world’s wealthiest at higher levels, rich nations want to give their richest more opportunities to become ever richer.

Nations rich with fossil fuels most heartily agree. The “onus” for financing moves to counter the climate crisis, COP29 President Mukhtar Babayev from Azerbaijan is arguing, “cannot fall entirely on government purses.”

Our globe’s richest nations would also like to expand the trading of “carbon credits,” transactions that let wealthy developed nations delay making costly emissions cuts at home by underwriting much less costly climate actions in poor nations.

But the offset projects that developed nations underwrite, The Guardiannotes, have regularly overpromised and underdelivered, leaving “wildfires burning through forests that were supposed to be protected and emissions from renewable energy projects being counted on balance books even though they would probably have been built anyway.”

This year’s CO29 conference will wrap up on November 22, and no serious climate change analyst is predicting any consensus that could significantly slow our globe’s ever more perilous progress to climate collapse. Developed nations, Bloomberg’s Mark Gongloff observes, remain “loath to pitch in more than $100 billion a year.”

“Transitioning the world to clean energy alone,” counters Gongloff, could actually cost $215 trillion by 2050.

How could the world make real progress toward those trillions? Guardian environmental editor Fiona Harvey earlier this week ran down some promising options.

Nations could for starters, Harvey notes, put a serious tax bite on the “unprecedented” profit bonanza that fossil fuel companies have enjoyed ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Those companies have pocketed well over a quarter-trillion dollars in profits in the two years since.

Nations could also place new taxes on the jet flights our richest so enjoy or move to end the more than $650 billion spent annually in the developing world on subsidies for fossil fuels and polluting industries. Better yet, in a world where our five richest billionaires have more than doubled their wealth since 2020, we could adopt the 2% annual tax on billionaire wealth that Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has proposed.

A global tax along that line could raise $250 billion per year from just the world’s 100 richest families.

The only sure thing about initiatives like these: No proposals that could make a real climate difference will get any serious attention at COP29, as the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, observed in his brief and biting remarks to conference-goers. Rama opened his address to COP29 by noting that he had decided to ditch his prepared remarks after spending some time in the conference’s leaders lounge.

The global notables in that lounge, Rama continued, had all gathered to “eat, drink, meet, and take photos together, while images of voiceless speeches from leaders play on and on and on in the background.”

“To me, this seems exactly like what happens in the real world every day,” he went on to explain. “Life goes on with its old habits, and our speeches, filled with good words about fighting climate change, change nothing.”

Concluded Rama, a former artist and the current chair of his nation’s Socialist Party: “What on Earth are we doing in this gathering, over and over and over, if there is no common political will on the horizon to go beyond words and unite for meaningful action?”

That inaction—in the face of overwhelming global public support for greater pro-climate action—continues to comfort our world’s most fantastically wealthy.

Original article by Sam Pizzigati republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingThe Climate Finance Plan Leaders Won’t Consider at COP29? Tax the Rich

Tax Dodging by Super-Rich, Big Corporations Costs Nations Half a Trillion Per Year: Study

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A crowd of demonstrators marches in Saint-Brieuc, France on May 1, 2024. (Photo: Emmanuelle Pays/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)

“The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system,” said the chief executive of the Tax Justice Network.

A study published Tuesday estimates that tax dodging enabled by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other wealthy nations is costing countries around the world nearly half a trillion dollars in revenue each year, underscoring the urgent need for global reforms to prevent rich individuals and large corporations from shirking their obligations.

The new study, conducted by the Tax Justice Network (TJN), finds that “the combined costs of cross-border tax abuse by multinational companies and by individuals with undeclared assets offshore stands at an estimated $492 billion.” Of that total in lost revenue, corporate tax dodging is responsible for more than $347 billion, according to TJN’s calculations.

“For people everywhere, the losses translate into foregone public services, and weakened states at greater risk of falling prey to political extremism,” the study reads. “And in the same way, there is scope for all to benefit from moving tax rule-setting out of the OECD and into a globally inclusive and fully transparent process at the United Nations.”

The analysis estimates that just eight countries—the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Japan, Israel, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand—are enabling large-scale tax avoidance by opposing popular global reform efforts. Late last year, those same eight countries were the lonely opponents of the United Nations General Assembly’s vote to set in motion the process of establishing a U.N. tax convention.

According to the new TJN study, those eight countries are responsible for roughly half of the $492 billion lost per year globally to tax avoidance by the rich and large multinational corporations, despite being home to just 8% of the world’s population.

“The hurtful eight voted for a world where we all keep losing half a trillion a year to tax-cheating multinational corporations and the super-rich,” Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network, said in a statement Tuesday. “The U.K. and the U.S. are both among the biggest enablers and the biggest losers of this lose-lose tax system, and their people consistently demand an end to tax abuse, so it’s absurd that the U.S. and U.K. are seeking to preserve it.”

“It’s perhaps harder to understand why the other handful of blockers, like Australia, Canada, and Japan, who don’t play anything like such a damaging role, would be willing to go along with this,” Cobham added.

https://twitter.com/TaxJusticeNet/status/1858880408357888306?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1858880408357888306%7Ctwgr%5E212231be390df1278a214d4c3357d2bb5ea63942%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.commondreams.org%2Fnews%2Fglobal-tax-dodging

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TJN released its study as G20 nations—a group that includes most of the “hurtful eight”—issued a communiqué pledging to “engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” Brazil, which hosted the G20 summit, led the push for language calling for taxation of the global super-rich.

The document drew praise from advocacy groups including the Fight Inequality Alliance, which stressed the need to “transform the rhetoric on taxing the rich into global reality.”

The communiqué was released amid concerns that the election of far-right billionaire Donald Trump in the U.S. could derail progress toward a global solution to pervasive and costly tax avoidance.

The new TJN study cites Trump’s pledge to cut the statutory U.S. corporate tax rate from 21% to 15% and warns such a move would accelerate the global “race to the bottom” on corporate taxation.

“People in countries around the world are calling in large majorities on their governments to tax multinational corporations properly,” Liz Nelson, TJN’s director of advocacy and research, said Tuesday. “But governments continue to exercise a policy of appeasement on corporate tax.”

“We now have data from these governments showing that when they asked multinational corporations to pay less tax, the corporations cheated even more,” Nelson added. “It’s time governments found the spines their people deserve from their leaders.”

Original article by Jake Johnson republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Continue ReadingTax Dodging by Super-Rich, Big Corporations Costs Nations Half a Trillion Per Year: Study