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29 April 21
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Bill McKibben | Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap
Bill McKibben, The New Yorker
McKibben writes: "Earth Week has come and gone, leaving behind an ankle-deep and green-tinted drift of reports, press releases, and earnest promises from C.E.O.s and premiers alike that they are planning to become part of the solution."
Now the biggest barrier to change is the will of our politicians to take serious climate action.
arth Week has come and gone, leaving behind an ankle-deep and green-tinted drift of reports, press releases, and earnest promises from C.E.O.s and premiers alike that they are planning to become part of the solution. There were contingent signs of real possibility—if some of the heads of state whom John Kerry called on to make Zoom speeches appeared a little strained, at least they appeared. (Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister of Australia, the most carbon-emitting developed nation per capita, struggled to make his technology work.) But, if you want real hope, the best place to look may be a little noted report from the London-based think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative.
Titled “The Sky’s the Limit,” it begins by declaring that “solar and wind potential is far higher than that of fossil fuels and can meet global energy demand many times over.” Taken by itself, that’s not a very bold claim: scientists have long noted that the sun directs more energy to the Earth in an hour than humans use in a year. But, until very recently, it was too expensive to capture that power. That’s what has shifted—and so quickly and so dramatically that most of the world’s politicians are now living on a different planet than the one we actually inhabit. On the actual Earth, circa 2021, the report reads, “with current technology and in a subset of available locations we can capture at least 6,700 PWh p.a. [petawatt-hours per year] from solar and wind, which is more than 100 times global energy demand.” And this will not require covering the globe with solar arrays: “The land required for solar panels alone to provide all global energy is 450,000 km2, 0.3% of the global land area of 149 million km2. That is less than the land required for fossil fuels today, which in the US alone is 126,000 km2, 1.3% of the country.” These are the kinds of numbers that reshape your understanding of the future.
We haven’t yet fully grasped this potential because it’s happened so fast. In 2015, zero per cent of solar’s technical potential was economically viable—the small number of solar panels that existed at that time had to be heavily subsidized. But prices for solar energy have collapsed so fast over the past three years that sixty per cent of that potential is already economically viable. And, because costs continue to slide with every quarter, solar energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels almost everywhere on the planet by the decade’s end. (It’s a delicious historical irony that this evolution took place, entirely by coincidence, during the Administration of Donald Trump, even as he ranted about how solar wasn’t “strong enough” and was “very, very expensive.”) The Carbon Tracker report, co-written by Kingsmill Bond, is full of fascinating points, including how renewable energy is the biggest gift of all for some of the poorest nations, including in Africa, where solar potential outweighs current energy use by a factor of more than a thousand. Only a few countries—Singapore, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and a handful of European countries—are “stretched” in their ability to rely on renewables, because they both use a lot of energy and have little unoccupied land. In these terms, Germany is in the third-worst position, and the fact that it is nonetheless one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy should be a powerful signal: “If the Germans can find solutions, then so can everyone else.” Clearly, those few nations are going to be importing some renewable energy—a more farsighted Australian Prime Minister would be figuring out how to send ships full of solar-generated hydrogen to Japan, not how to continue shipping coal to China. (And, in fact, the world’s largest solar farm is set to end up in the Australian outback, connected by at least two thick undersea cables to Singapore.)
The numbers in the report are overwhelming—even if the analysts are too optimistic by half, we’ll still be swimming in cheap solar energy. “We have established that technical and economic barriers have been crossed by falling costs. It follows that the main remaining barrier to change is the ability of incumbents to manipulate political forces to stop change,” the report reads. Indeed. And the problem is that we need that change to happen right now, because the curves of damage from the climate crisis are as steep as the curves of falling solar prices. Given three or four decades, economics will clearly take care of the problem—the low price of solar power will keep pushing us to replace liquid fuels with electricity generated from the sun, and, eventually, no one will have a gas boiler in the basement or an internal-combustion engine in the car. But, if the transition takes three or four decades, no one will have an ice cap in the Arctic, either, and everyone who lives near a coast will be figuring out where on earth to go.
That conundrum was illuminated on Friday, when word came that Governor Gavin Newsom, of California, who has been under pressure from an unrelenting activist campaign, agreed to ban new fracking permits in his state and end fossil-fuel production there altogether. This is a stunning achievement—for the planet and also for the California communities (and you can guess what kinds of communities they are) that currently have oil wells in their schoolyards and next to their hospitals. The environmentalists who banded together in the Last Chance Alliance should be incredibly proud; Newsom (who is now facing a recall election) deserves credit, as well, because this is precisely the step that his famously green predecessor, Jerry Brown, did not take. The fracking ban, though, only affects a small percentage of California’s oil production, and won’t take effect until 2024. The ban on oil production would not happen until 2045, which in climate terms is the very distant future—a decade past the date when California will ban the sale of new gas-powered cars, which are the main use of oil in the state. It’s clear why Newsom is slow-walking the changes. An executive secretary of a building-trades council immediately responded, “We will work to oppose this effort for our membership, their families, our schools, and our future. I have one question for Gavin Newsom: Are our jobs too dirty for you?”
Change is hard. The job of politicians is to make it easier for those affected, so that what must happen can happen—and within the time we’ve been allotted by physics. But that hard job is infinitely easier now that renewable energy is suddenly so cheap. The falling price puts the wind at our backs, as it were. It’s the greatest gift we could have been given as a civilization, and we dare not waste it.
Passing the Mic
Audrea Lim is a Brooklyn-based journalist who has written for this magazine, and also for Harper’s, the Times, and The Nation. She is the editor of the book “The World We Need: Stories and Lessons from America’s Unsung Environmental Movement,” which the New Press will publish next week. For the book, she surveyed America, finding the people who are powering the environmental movement now. (Our conversation has been edited for length.)
People may have an image in their mind of what an environmentalist looks like—but what does an environmentalist actually look like in 2021?
They don’t look any one way! Far from the “white college-educated hippie” stereotype, environmentalists are Black and brown youth transforming an abandoned jail into a community farm; a former coal miner turned blogger and environmental advocate; Asian, Latinx, and indigenous people creating healthier and more equitable neighborhoods for their kids.
“Environmentalist” just describes any people defending the quality of their surroundings. This work can be local (protecting air or water from toxic emissions or lead paint in the walls) or global (protecting the glaciers and oceans that regulate local climates, from Brooklyn’s streets to the Alaskan coast). The health, safety, and well-being of their communities hang in the balance, but many activists understand that these goals also require bigger changes, from better access to parks, recreation, and community spaces to more localized food systems and good, clean jobs. I think that’s why many environmentalists don’t even call themselves “environmentalists.” They are culture-makers, or community, housing, labor, and immigration activists who understand that environmental issues are ingrained in every part of society, and have simply made them a core element of their work.
What are the most important insights that came as, say, the climate movement morphed into the climate-justice movement?
That climate change will touch every community, demographic, and region, but is also on track to devastate poor and BIPOC communities the most. Many of these communities already struggle to meet basic needs—food, housing, education, physical and mental health—making them more vulnerable to sudden shocks, as we’ve seen through the pandemic. Many of these communities also live near polluting developments (factories, refineries, waste incinerators) or on eroded and contaminated lands (mines, Superfund sites), or lack proper water and sewage infrastructure. These are added risks when the fires and floods arrive.
This uneven burden is part of America’s legacy of environmental racism: a history of hazardous, polluting fossil-fuel developments being concentrated in communities of color—sometimes by design and often through neglect. It’s the conjoined twin of residential segregation. But, in addressing this reality head on, the climate-justice movement also has another important insight to offer: everyone benefits when we empower these communities to build more equitable, resilient local economies, and transition away from the dirty industries long looming over them.
If you could pick one story that would really stick in people’s minds and hearts, what would it be?
Eric Enos grew up on the Waianae Coast of Oahu, with little knowledge of his Native Hawaiian culture, including the central importance of taro, a root vegetable. (Native culture was suppressed under U.S. colonialism.) After graduating from college, in the seventies, he began teaching art to Native youth-gang members, taking them to dive in the ocean, protest the conversion of local fishing grounds into a resort, and hike in the back of the desiccated Waianae Valley. Here they found abandoned walls and terraces in the ground. These were clearly cultural sites, but what were they?
Archeologists at the Bishop Museum found that the entire area was once under taro cultivation, as well as other traditional Hawaiian plants. The water had long ago been diverted toward colonial sugar plantations, but, with guidance from a state senator and local agencies, Enos, the youth, and community members built a new irrigation system. A group of multi-ethnic taro farmers, whom they had earlier helped defend against eviction from their lands, helped prepare the terraces for cultivation. And, with seeds donated from the Lyon Arboretum, they began growing native plants, learning about the land, their own culture, and taro in the process.
These were the beginnings of Ka‘ala Farm, a cultural learning center that connects troubled youth to the land. The story underscores how different institutions and people from different communities can collaborate toward a more equitable and resilient future.
Climate School
Two former Prime Ministers of Australia wrote an insightful op-ed about why their country, bathed in sun, continues to insist on building more coal mines and gas wells. They note that “the main thing holding back Australia’s climate ambition is politics: a toxic coalition of the Murdoch press, the right wing of the Liberal and National parties, and vested interests in the fossil fuel sector.” Last week, the center-left Australian Labor Party, too, said that it will not stand against building more coal mines, and believes that the nation will be exporting the black rocks past 2050.
A wonderful leftover from Earth Day: Tia Nelson, the daughter of the late senator Gaylord Nelson, who launched the April day of action, in 1970, wrote about how her father helped welcome Joe Biden to the Senate, in 1973, comforting him after his wife and infant daughter had been killed in a car crash. Nelson said, of her father, “It would delight him to see that something he started so long ago, to shake the Washington establishment out of its lethargy, still playing such an important role these many years later. And he would be moved to see that the heartbroken young man he helped recover from despair is carrying his legacy forward.” It’s remarkable how long Biden has been around—one good effect is that he’s known some superb people.
A new study has found that climate change will cause lakes in the Northern Hemisphere to stratify earlier in the year and over longer periods, and that “many of the ecosystem services that lakes provide, ranging from the delivery of drinking water and food to recreation, may be endangered by the projected change in stratification phenology during the twenty-first century, particularly in urbanized and agricultural regions where lakes are already eutrophic.”
A sign of what’s to come: a new renewable-energy project in Oregon marries solar power, wind turbines, and large-capacity battery storage. A spokesman for the local utility, Portland General Electric, said, “We feel pretty certain that this is what the future of renewable power looks like. It’s more diverse, and it’s more flexible.” A little further south and looking a little further into the future, the invaluable Sammy Roth, in his weekly “Boiling Point” newsletter, discusses the possibility of covering California’s irrigation canals with solar panels, to both generate clean energy and cut evaporation.
The Movement for Black Lives is launching a Red Black and Green New Deal, with a virtual summit on May 11th. Its Web site states, “We are organizing to introduce a National Black Climate Agenda that includes federal legislation to address the climate crisis by investing in Black communities and repairing past harms.”
A Yale team has developed a podcast devoted to climate policy and carbon pricing—the most recent episode is about why conservatives might be comfortable with the tactic. As Naomi Shimberg, a junior, explains, “Many conservatives echo the classic economic argument: pricing harm across the economy, rather than controlling it with direct forms of government regulation, is the most efficient way to cut pollution.”
Scoreboard
A new report from the World Meteorological Organization documented just how dismal 2020 was in climatic terms: it was one of the three warmest years on record, with more than eighty per cent of the world’s oceans subject to at least one “marine heat wave;” extensive flooding in the Greater Horn of Africa helped trigger a plague of locusts; and severe drought in South America caused three billion dollars in crop losses in Brazil alone.
A Baylor College of Medicine pediatrician and a University of California, Davis, environmental economist published an assessment, in Scientific American, of the actual health impact of climate change. They argue that the Biden Administration should set the “social cost” of carbon at a higher level, to reflect the damage that it’s doing to “every organ system in the human body.”
Water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead are expected to drop to record lows in the coming months, and reduced snowpacks and increased evaporation along the Colorado watershed may trigger the first-ever official water-shortage declaration in the area—and, hence, cuts in the water supply to Arizona and Nevada.
The student-body presidents of all the Ivy League schools signed a joint call for full fossil-fuel divestment last week. Meanwhile, divestment campaigners at Harvard produced a series of comic sketches as part of their ongoing efforts, and Christiana Figueres, the former head of the United Nations convention on climate change who spearheaded the push for the Paris accord, criticized the university for its investments in fossil-fuel companies, warning that Harvard management is on the verge of “breaching its true fiduciary responsibility.”
The Times obtained a detailed summary of an upcoming United Nations scientific report, which makes clear that, in addition to cutting carbon emissions, controlling methane emissions is crucial in solving the climate crisis. Along with issuing calls for plugging leaks, the report makes the critical point, according to the Times, that “expanding the use of natural gas is incompatible with keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a goal of the international Paris Agreement.”
Warming Up
Bonnie Raitt and the Indigo Girls are among the artists who cut “No More Pipeline Blues (On this Land Where We Belong),” to raise money and awareness for the fight against Minnesota’s Line 3 pipeline. Listen for the voice of the first enrolled member of a Native American tribe to be named U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo.
Protesters call for justice in the shooting death of Anthony Alvarez outside the headquarters of the Civilian Office of Police Accountability on Tuesday. (photo: Jose M. Osorio/AP)
Chicago Police Chase Down, Shoot, Kill Another Kid With a Gun
Tim Fitzsimons, NBC News
Fitzsimons writes: "The Chicago Civilian Office of Police Accountability on Wednesday released the body camera video of the fatal police shooting of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez in March."
People walk by a police car downtown on May 13, 2014, in Newark, New Jersey. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty)
Newark Police Didn't Fire Shots in 2020 Due to Reform
Ashley Terrell, The Grio
Terrell writes: "'Police reform is possible. Newark is a great example,' a Twitter user said."
READ MORE
Stephen Colbert on Biden's first speech to Congress: 'What did we see tonight? The oldest president of all time, no handshakes, just fist-bumping, 200 people in the room, and everybody in masks. It hasn't felt that normal in five years.' (photo: YouTube)
Stephen Colbert on Biden's Speech: 'Hasn't Felt That Normal in Five Years'
Adrian Horton, Guardian UK
Horton writes: "The Late Show aired live after Joe Biden's first address to a (Covid-limited) joint session of Congress, to mark his first 100 days in office. 'Because of the pandemic, tonight was a bit odd,' Stephen Colbert said."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) with reporters in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, April 28. (photo: Sarah Silbiger/Getty)
Democrats Seek to Push Medicare Expansion as Part of Biden's $1.8 Trillion Families Plan, Defying White House
Tony Romm and Seung Min Kim, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Congressional Democrats are planning to pursue a massive expansion of Medicare as part of President Biden's new $1.8 trillion economic relief package, defying the White House after it opted against including a major health overhaul as part of its plan."
Burial of a person who died of Covid 19 in Gauhati, India. (photo: Anupam Nath/AP)
ALSO SEE: India COVID Cases Cross 18 Million, Gravediggers Work Round the Clock
Arundhati Roy | India's Handling of the Covid Crisis Is Crime Against Humanity
Arundhati Roy, Guardian UK
Roy writes: "During a particularly polarizing election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even further."
It’s hard to convey the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity that people are being subjected to. Meanwhile, Modi and his allies are telling us not to complain
uring a particularly polarising election campaign in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 2017, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, waded into the fray to stir things up even further. From a public podium, he accused the state government – which was led by an opposition party – of pandering to the Muslim community by spending more on Muslim graveyards (kabristans) than on Hindu cremation grounds (shamshans). With his customary braying sneer, in which every taunt and barb rises to a high note mid-sentence before it falls away in a menacing echo, he stirred up the crowd. “If a kabristan is built in a village, a shamshan should also be constructed there,” he said.
“Shamshan! Shamshan!” the mesmerised, adoring crowd echoed back.
Perhaps he is happy now that the haunting image of the flames rising from the mass funerals in India’s cremation grounds is making the front page of international newspapers. And that all the kabristans and shamshans in his country are working properly, in direct proportion to the populations they cater for, and far beyond their capacities.
“Can India, population 1.3 billion, be isolated?” the Washington Post asked rhetorically in a recent editorial about India’s unfolding catastrophe and the difficulty of containing new, fast-spreading Covid variants within national borders. “Not easily,” it replied. It’s unlikely this question was posed in quite the same way when the coronavirus was raging through the UK and Europe just a few months ago. But we in India have little right to take offence, given our prime minister’s words at the World Economic Forum in January this year.
Modi spoke at a time when people in Europe and the US were suffering through the peak of the second wave of the pandemic. He had not one word of sympathy to offer, only a long, gloating boast about India’s infrastructure and Covid-preparedness. I downloaded the speech because I fear that when history is rewritten by the Modi regime, as it soon will be, it might disappear, or become hard to find. Here are some priceless snippets:
“Friends, I have brought the message of confidence, positivity and hope from 1.3 billion Indians amid these times of apprehension … It was predicted that India would be the most affected country from corona all over the world. It was said that there would be a tsunami of corona infections in India, somebody said 700-800 million Indians would get infected while others said 2 million Indians would die.”
“Friends, it would not be advisable to judge India’s success with that of another country. In a country which is home to 18% of the world population, that country has saved humanity from a big disaster by containing corona effectively.”
Modi the magician takes a bow for saving humanity by containing the coronavirus effectively. Now that it turns out that he has not contained it, can we complain about being viewed as though we are radioactive? That other countries’ borders are being closed to us and flights are being cancelled? That we’re being sealed in with our virus and our prime minister, along with all the sickness, the anti-science, the hatred and the idiocy that he, his party and its brand of politics represent?
When the first wave of Covid came to India and then subsided last year, the government and its supportive commentariat were triumphant. “India isn’t having a picnic,” tweeted Shekhar Gupta, the editor-in-chief of the online news site the Print. “But our drains aren’t choked with bodies, hospitals aren’t out of beds, nor crematoriums & graveyards out of wood or space. Too good to be true? Bring data if you disagree. Unless you think you’re god.” Leave aside the callous, disrespectful imagery – did we need a god to tell us that most pandemics have a second wave?
This one was predicted, although its virulence has taken even scientists and virologists by surprise. So where is the Covid-specific infrastructure and the “people’s movement” against the virus that Modi boasted about in his speech? Hospital beds are unavailable. Doctors and medical staff are at breaking point. Friends call with stories about wards with no staff and more dead patients than live ones. People are dying in hospital corridors, on roads and in their homes. Crematoriums in Delhi have run out of firewood. The forest department has had to give special permission for the felling of city trees. Desperate people are using whatever kindling they can find. Parks and car parks are being turned into cremation grounds. It’s as if there’s an invisible UFO parked in our skies, sucking the air out of our lungs. An air raid of a kind we’ve never known.
Oxygen is the new currency on India’s morbid new stock exchange. Senior politicians, journalists, lawyers – India’s elite – are on Twitter pleading for hospital beds and oxygen cylinders. The hidden market for cylinders is booming. Oxygen saturation machines and drugs are hard to come by.
There are markets for other things, too. At the bottom end of the free market, a bribe to sneak a last look at your loved one, bagged and stacked in a hospital mortuary. A surcharge for a priest who agrees to say the final prayers. Online medical consultancies in which desperate families are fleeced by ruthless doctors. At the top end, you might need to sell your land and home and use up every last rupee for treatment at a private hospital. Just the deposit alone, before they even agree to admit you, could set your family back a couple of generations.
None of this conveys the full depth and range of the trauma, the chaos and, above all, the indignity that people are being subjected to. What happened to my young friend T is just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of similar stories in Delhi alone. T, who is in his 20s, lives in his parents’ tiny flat in Ghaziabad on the outskirts of Delhi. All three of them tested positive for Covid. His mother was critically ill. Since it was in the early days, he was lucky enough to find a hospital bed for her. His father, diagnosed with severe bipolar depression, turned violent and began to harm himself. He stopped sleeping. He soiled himself. His psychiatrist was online trying to help, although she also broke down from time to time because her husband had just died from Covid. She said T’s father needed hospitalisation, but since he was Covid positive there was no chance of that. So T stayed awake, night after night, holding his father down, sponging him, cleaning him up. Each time I spoke to him I felt my own breath falter. Finally, the message came: “Father’s dead.” He did not die of Covid, but of a massive spike in blood pressure induced by a psychiatric meltdown induced by utter helplessness.
What to do with the body? I desperately called everybody I knew. Among those who responded was Anirban Bhattacharya, who works with the well-known social activist Harsh Mander. Bhattacharya is about to stand trial on a charge of sedition for a protest he helped organise on his university campus in 2016. Mander, who has not fully recovered from a savage case of Covid last year, is being threatened with arrest and the closure of the orphanages he runs after he mobilised people against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019, both of which blatantly discriminate against Muslims. Mander and Bhattacharya are among the many citizens who, in the absence of all forms of governance, have set up helplines and emergency responses, and are running themselves ragged organising ambulances and coordinating funerals and the transport of dead bodies. It’s not safe for these volunteers to do what they’re doing. In this wave of the pandemic, it’s the young who are falling, who are filling the intensive care units. When young people die, the older among us lose a little of our will to live.
T’s father was cremated. T and his mother are recovering.
Things will settle down eventually. Of course, they will. But we don’t know who among us will survive to see that day. The rich will breathe easier. The poor will not. For now, among the sick and dying, there is a vestige of democracy. The rich have been felled, too. Hospitals are begging for oxygen. Some have started bring-your-own-oxygen schemes. The oxygen crisis has led to intense, unseemly battles between states, with political parties trying to deflect blame from themselves.
On the night of 22 April, 25 critically ill coronavirus patients on high-flow oxygen died in one of Delhi’s biggest private hospitals, Sir Ganga Ram. The hospital issued several desperate SOS messages for the replenishment of its oxygen supply. A day later, the chair of the hospital board rushed to clarify matters: “We cannot say that they have died due to lack of oxygen support.” On 24 April, 20 more patients died when oxygen supplies were depleted in another big Delhi hospital, Jaipur Golden. That same day, in the Delhi high court, Tushar Mehta, India’s solicitor general, speaking for the government of India, said: “Let’s try and not be a cry baby … so far we have ensured that no one in the country was left without oxygen.”
Ajay Mohan Bisht, the saffron-robed chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who goes by the name Yogi Adityanath, has declared that there is no shortage of oxygen in any hospital in his state and that rumourmongers will be arrested without bail under the National Security Act and have their property seized.
Yogi Adityanath doesn’t play around. Siddique Kappan, a Muslim journalist from Kerala, jailed for months in Uttar Pradesh when he and two others travelled there to report on the gang-rape and murder of a Dalit girl in Hathras district, is critically ill and has tested positive for Covid. His wife, in a desperate petition to the chief justice of the supreme court of India, says her husband is lying chained “like an animal” to a hospital bed in the Medical College hospital in Mathura. (The supreme court has now ordered the Uttar Pradesh government to move him to a hospital in Delhi.) So, if you live in Uttar Pradesh, the message seems to be, please do yourself a favour and die without complaining.
The threat to those who complain is not restricted to Uttar Pradesh. A spokesperson for the fascist Hindu nationalist organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – of which Modi and several of his ministers are members, and which runs its own armed militia – has warned that “anti-India forces” would use the crisis to fuel “negativity” and “mistrust” and asked the media to help foster a “positive atmosphere”. Twitter has helped them out by deactivating accounts critical of the government.
Where shall we look for solace? For science? Shall we cling to numbers? How many dead? How many recovered? How many infected? When will the peak come? On 27 April, the report was 323,144 new cases, 2,771 deaths. The precision is somewhat reassuring. Except – how do we know? Tests are hard to come by, even in Delhi. The number of Covid-protocol funerals from graveyards and crematoriums in small towns and cities suggest a death toll up to 30 times higher than the official count. Doctors who are working outside the metropolitan areas can tell you how it is.
If Delhi is breaking down, what should we imagine is happening in villages in Bihar, in Uttar Pradesh, in Madhya Pradesh? Where tens of millions of workers from the cities, carrying the virus with them, are fleeing home to their families, traumatised by their memory of Modi’s national lockdown in 2020. It was the strictest lockdown in the world, announced with only four hours’ notice. It left migrant workers stranded in cities with no work, no money to pay their rent, no food and no transport. Many had to walk hundreds of miles to their homes in far-flung villages. Hundreds died on the way.
This time around, although there is no national lockdown, the workers have left while transport is still available, while trains and buses are still running. They’ve left because they know that even though they make up the engine of the economy in this huge country, when a crisis comes, in the eyes of this administration, they simply don’t exist. This year’s exodus has resulted in a different kind of chaos: there are no quarantine centres for them to stay in before they enter their village homes. There’s not even the meagre pretence of trying to protect the countryside from the city virus.
These are villages where people die of easily treatable diseases like diarrhoea and tuberculosis. How are they to cope with Covid? Are Covid tests available to them? Are there hospitals? Is there oxygen? More than that, is there love? Forget love, is there even concern? There isn’t. Because there is only a heart-shaped hole filled with cold indifference where India’s public heart should be.
Early this morning, on 28 April, news came that our friend Prabhubhai has died. Before he died, he showed classic Covid symptoms. But his death will not register in the official Covid count because he died at home without a test or treatment. Prabhubhai was a stalwart of the anti-dam movement in the Narmada valley. I stayed several times at his home in Kevadia, where decades ago the first group of indigenous tribespeople were thrown off their lands to make room for the dam-builders and officers’ colony. Displaced families like Prabhubhai’s still remain on the edges of that colony, impoverished and unsettled, transgressors on land that was once theirs.
There is no hospital in Kevadia. There’s only the Statue of Unity, built in the likeness of the freedom fighter and first deputy prime minister of India, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who the dam is named after. At 182 metres high, it’s the tallest statue in the world and cost US$422m. High-speed elevators inside take tourists up to view the Narmada dam from the level of Sardar Patel’s chest. Of course, you cannot see the river valley civilisation that lies destroyed, submerged in the depths of the vast reservoir, or hear the stories of the people who waged one of the most beautiful, profound struggles the world has ever known – not just against that one dam, but against the accepted ideas of what constitutes civilisation, happiness and progress. The statue was Modi’s pet project. He inaugurated it in October 2018.
The friend who messaged about Prabhubhai had spent years as an anti-dam activist in the Narmada valley. She wrote: “My hands shiver as I write this. Covid situation in and around Kevadia Colony grim.”
The precise numbers that make up India’s Covid graph are like the wall that was built in Ahmedabad to hide the slums Donald Trump would drive past on his way to the “Namaste Trump” event that Modi hosted for him in February 2020. Grim as those numbers are, they give you a picture of the India-that-matters, but certainly not the India that is. In the India that is, people are expected to vote as Hindus, but die as disposables.
“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”
Try not to pay attention to the fact that the possibility of a dire shortage of oxygen had been flagged as far back as April 2020, and then again in November by a committee set up by the government itself. Try not to wonder why even Delhi’s biggest hospitals don’t have their own oxygen-generating plants. Try not to wonder why the PM Cares Fund – the opaque organisation that has recently replaced the more public Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund, and which uses public money and government infrastructure but functions like a private trust with zero public accountability – has suddenly moved in to address the oxygen crisis. Will Modi own shares in our air-supply now?
“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”
Understand that there were and are so many far more pressing issues for the Modi government to attend to. Destroying the last vestiges of democracy, persecuting non-Hindu minorities and consolidating the foundations of the Hindu Nation makes for a relentless schedule. There are massive prison complexes, for example, that must be urgently constructed in Assam for the 2 million people who have lived there for generations and have suddenly been stripped of their citizenship. (On this matter, our independent supreme court came down hard on the side of the government and leniently on the side of the vandals.)
There are hundreds of students and activists and young Muslim citizens to be tried and imprisoned as the primary accused in the anti-Muslim pogrom that took place against their own community in north-east Delhi last March. If you are Muslim in India, it’s a crime to be murdered. Your folks will pay for it. There was the inauguration of the new Ram Temple in Ayodhya, which is being built in place of the mosque that was hammered to dust by Hindu vandals watched over by senior BJP politicians. (On this matter, our independent supreme court came down hard on the side of the government and the vandals.) There were the controversial new Farm Bills to be passed, corporatising agriculture. There were hundreds of thousands of farmers to be beaten and teargassed when they came out on to the streets to protest.
Then there’s the multi-multi-multimillion-dollar plan for a grand new replacement for the fading grandeur of New Delhi’s imperial centre to be urgently attended to. After all, how can the government of the new Hindu India be housed in old buildings? While Delhi is locked down, ravaged by the pandemic, construction work on the “Central Vista” project, declared as an essential service, has begun. Workers are being transported in. Maybe they can alter the plans to add a crematorium.
There was also the Kumbh Mela to be organised, so that millions of Hindu pilgrims could crowd together in a small town to bathe in the Ganges and spread the virus even-handedly as they returned to their homes across the country, blessed and purified. This Kumbh rocks on, although Modi has gently suggested that it might be an idea for the holy dip to become “symbolic” – whatever that means. (Unlike what happened with those who attended a conference for the Islamic organisation Tablighi Jamaat last year, the media has not run a campaign against them calling them “corona jihadis” or accusing them of committing crimes against humanity.) There were also those few thousand Rohingya refugees who had to be urgently deported back to the genocidal regime in Myanmar from where they had fled – in the middle of a coup. (Once again, when our independent supreme court was petitioned on this matter, it concurred with the government’s view.)
So, as you can tell, it’s been busy, busy, busy.
Over and above all this urgent activity, there is an election to be won in the state of West Bengal. This required our home minister, Modi’s man Amit Shah, to more or less abandon his cabinet duties and focus all his attention on Bengal for months, to disseminate his party’s murderous propaganda, to pit human against human in every little town and village. Geographically, West Bengal is a small state. The election could have taken place in a single day, and has done so in the past. But since it is new territory for the BJP, the party needed time to move its cadres, many of who are not from Bengal, from constituency to constituency to oversee the voting. The election schedule was divided into eight phases, spread out over a month, the last on 29 April. As the count of corona infections ticked up, the other political parties pleaded with the election commission to rethink the election schedule. The commission refused and came down hard on the side of the BJP, and the campaign continued. Who hasn’t seen the videos of the BJP’s star campaigner, the prime minister himself, triumphant and maskless, speaking to the maskless crowds, thanking people for coming out in unprecedented numbers? That was on 17 April, when the official number of daily infections was already rocketing upward of 200,000.
Now, as voting closes, Bengal is poised to become the new corona cauldron, with a new triple mutant strain known as – guess what – the “Bengal strain”. Newspapers report that every second person tested in the state capital, Kolkata, is Covid positive. The BJP has declared that if it wins Bengal, it will ensure people get free vaccines. And if it doesn’t?
“Let’s try and not be a cry baby.”
Anyway, what about the vaccines? Surely they’ll save us? Isn’t India a vaccine powerhouse? In fact, the Indian government is entirely dependent on two manufacturers, the Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech. Both are being allowed to roll out two of the most expensive vaccines in the world, to the poorest people in the world. This week they announced that they will sell to private hospitals at a slightly elevated price, and to state governments at a somewhat lower price. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show the vaccine companies are likely to make obscene profits.
Under Modi, India’s economy has been hollowed out, and hundreds of millions of people who were already living precarious lives have been pushed into abject poverty. A huge number now depend for survival on paltry earnings from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which was instituted in 2005 when the Congress party was in power. It is impossible to expect that families on the verge of starvation will pay most of a month’s income to have themselves vaccinated. In the UK, vaccines are free and a fundamental right. Those trying to get vaccinated out of turn can be prosecuted. In India, the main underlying impetus of the vaccination campaign seems to be corporate profit.
As this epic catastrophe plays out on our Modi-aligned Indian television channels, you’ll notice how they all speak in one tutored voice. The “system” has collapsed, they say, again and again. The virus has overwhelmed India’s health care “system”.
The system has not collapsed. The “system” barely existed. The government – this one, as well as the Congress government that preceded it – deliberately dismantled what little medical infrastructure there was. This is what happens when a pandemic hits a country with an almost nonexistent public healthcare system. India spends about 1.25% of its gross domestic product on health, far lower than most countries in the world, even the poorest ones. Even that figure is thought to be inflated, because things that are important but do not strictly qualify as healthcare have been slipped into it. So the real figure is estimated to be more like 0.34%. The tragedy is that in this devastatingly poor country, as a 2016 Lancet study shows, 78% of the healthcare in urban areas and 71% in rural areas is now handled by the private sector. The resources that remain in the public sector are systematically siphoned into the private sector by a nexus of corrupt administrators and medical practitioners, corrupt referrals and insurance rackets.
Healthcare is a fundamental right. The private sector will not cater to starving, sick, dying people who don’t have money. This massive privatisation of India’s healthcare is a crime.
The system hasn’t collapsed. The government has failed. Perhaps “failed” is an inaccurate word, because what we are witnessing is not criminal negligence, but an outright crime against humanity. Virologists predict that the number of cases in India will grow exponentially to more than 500,000 a day. They predict the death of many hundreds of thousands in the coming months, perhaps more. My friends and I have agreed to call each other every day just to mark ourselves present, like roll call in our school classrooms. We speak to those we love in tears, and with trepidation, not knowing if we will ever see each other again. We write, we work, not knowing if we will live to finish what we started. Not knowing what horror and humiliation awaits us. The indignity of it all. That is what breaks us.
The hashtag #ModiMustResign is trending on social media. Some of the memes and illustrations show Modi with a heap of skulls peeping out from behind the curtain of his beard. Modi the Messiah speaking at a public rally of corpses. Modi and Amit Shah as vultures, scanning the horizon for corpses to harvest votes from. But that is only one part of the story. The other part is that the man with no feelings, the man with empty eyes and a mirthless smile, can, like so many tyrants in the past, arouse passionate feelings in others. His pathology is infectious. And that is what sets him apart. In north India, which is home to his largest voting base, and which, by dint of sheer numbers, tends to decide the political fate of the country, the pain he inflicts seems to turn into a peculiar pleasure.
Fredrick Douglass said it right: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” How we in India pride ourselves on our capacity to endure. How beautifully we have trained ourselves to meditate, to turn inward, to exorcise our fury as well as justify our inability to be egalitarian. How meekly we embrace our humiliation.
When he made his political debut as Gujarat’s new chief minister in 2001, Modi ensured his place in posterity after what has come to be known as the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. Over a period of a few days, Hindu vigilante mobs, watched over and sometimes actively assisted by the Gujarat police, murdered, raped and burned alive thousands of Muslims as “revenge” for a gruesome arson attack on a train in which more than 50 Hindu pilgrims had been burned alive. Once the violence subsided, Modi, who had until then only been appointed as chief minister by his party, called for early elections. The campaign in which he was portrayed as Hindu Hriday Samrat (“The Emperor of Hindu Hearts”) won him a landslide victory. Modi hasn’t lost an election since.
Several of the killers in the Gujrat pogrom were subsequently captured on camera by the journalist Ashish Khetan, boasting of how they hacked people to death, slashed pregnant women’s stomachs open and smashed infants’ heads against rocks. They said they could only have done what they did because Modi was their chief minister. Those tapes were broadcast on national TV. While Modi remained in the seat of power, Khetan, whose tapes were submitted to the courts and forensically examined, appeared as a witness on several occasions. Over time, some of the killers were arrested and imprisoned, but many were let off. In his recent book, Undercover: My Journey Into the Darkness of Hindutva, Khetan describes in detail how, during Modi’s tenure as chief minister, the Gujarat police, judges, lawyers, prosecutors and inquiry committees all colluded to tamper with evidence, intimidate witnesses and transfer judges.
Despite knowing all this, many of India’s so-called public intellectuals, the CEOs of its major corporations and the media houses they own, worked hard to pave the way for Modi to become the prime minister. They humiliated and shouted down those of us who persisted in our criticism. “Move on”, was their mantra. Even today, they mitigate their harsh words for Modi with praise for his oratory skills and his “hard work”. Their denunciation and bullying contempt for politicians in opposition parties is far more strident. They reserve their special scorn for Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, the only politician who has consistently warned of the coming Covid crisis and repeatedly asked the government to prepare itself as best it could. To assist the ruling party in its campaign to destroy all opposition parties amounts to colluding with the destruction of democracy.
So here we are now, in the hell of their collective making, with every independent institution essential to the functioning of a democracy compromised and hollowed out, and a virus that is out of control.
The crisis-generating machine that we call our government is incapable of leading us out of this disaster. Not least because one man makes all the decisions in this government, and that man is dangerous – and not very bright. This virus is an international problem. To deal with it, decision-making, at least on the control and administration of the pandemic, will need to pass into the hands of some sort of non-partisan body consisting of members of the ruling party, members of the opposition, and health and public policy experts.
As for Modi, is resigning from your crimes a feasible proposition? Perhaps he could just take a break from them – a break from all his hard work. There’s that $564m Boeing 777, Air India One, customised for VVIP travel – for him, actually – that’s been sitting idle on the runway for a while now. He and his men could just leave. The rest of us will do all we can to clean up their mess.
No, India cannot be isolated. We need help.
California forest. (photo: iStock)
The Climate Solution Actually Adding Millions of Tons of CO2 Into the Atmosphere
Lisa Song, ProPublica and James Temple, MIT Technology Review
Excerpt: "Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high."
New research shows that California’s climate policy created up to 39 million carbon credits that aren’t achieving real carbon savings. But companies can buy these forest offsets to justify polluting more anyway.
long the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high.
But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts.
Beyond the crest of the Klamath Mountains, you descend into an evergreen medley of sugar pines, incense cedars and still more Douglas firs. As you continue into the Cascade Range, you pass through sparser forests dominated by Ponderosa pines. These tall, slender trees with prickly cones thrive in the hotter, drier conditions on the eastern side of the state.
All trees consume carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen and storing the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots. Every ton of carbon sequestered in a living tree is a ton that isn’t contributing to climate change. And that thick coastal forest can easily store twice as much carbon per acre as the trees deeper inland.
This math is crucial to determining the success of California’s forest offset program, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by preserving trees. The state established the program a decade ago as part of its efforts to combat climate change.
But ecology is messy. The boundaries between forest types are nebulous, and the actual amount of carbon on any given acre depends on local climate conditions, conservation efforts, logging history and more.
California’s top climate regulator, the Air Resources Board, glossed over much of this complexity in implementing the state’s program. The agency established fixed boundaries around giant regions, boiling down the carbon stored in a wide mix of tree species into simplified, regional averages.
That decision has generated tens of millions of carbon credits with dubious climate value, according to a new analysis by CarbonPlan, a San Francisco nonprofit that analyzes the scientific integrity of carbon removal efforts.
The offset program allows forest owners across the country to earn credits for taking care of their land in ways that store or absorb more carbon, such as reducing logging or thinning out smaller trees and brush to allow for increased overall growth. Each credit represents one metric ton of CO2. Landowners can sell the credits to major polluters in California, typically oil companies and other businesses that want to emit more carbon than otherwise allowed under state law. Each extra ton of carbon emitted by industry is balanced out by an extra ton stored in the forest, allowing net emissions to stay within a cap set by the state.
As of last fall, the program had produced some six dozen projects that had generated more than 130 million credits, worth $1.8 billion at recent prices.
While calculating the exact amount of carbon saved by preserving forests is complicated, California’s logic for awarding credits is relatively straightforward.
The Air Resources Board establishes the average amount of carbon per acre stored in a few forest types spanning large regions of the United States. If you own land that contains more carbon than the regional average, based on a survey of trees on your site, you can get credits for the difference. For example, if your land holds the equivalent of 100 tons of CO2 per acre, and the regional average is 40 tons, you can earn credits for saving 60 tons per acre. (This story will refer to each ton of CO2-equivalent as a ton of “carbon.”) You must also commit to maintaining your forest’s high carbon storage for the next 100 years.
These regional averages are meant to represent carbon levels in typical private forests. But the averages are determined from such large areas and such diverse forest types that they can differ dramatically from the carbon stored on lands selected for projects.
Project forests that significantly exceed these averages are frequently earning far more credits than the actual carbon benefits they deliver, CarbonPlan found.
This design also incentivizes the developers who initiate and lead these projects to specifically look for forest tracts where carbon levels stand out above these averages — either due to the site’s location within a region, its combination of tree species, or both.
CarbonPlan estimates the state’s program has generated between 20 million and 39 million credits that don’t achieve real climate benefits. They are, in effect, ghost credits that didn’t preserve additional carbon in forests but did allow polluters to emit far more CO2, equal to the annual emissions of 8.5 million cars at the high end.
Those ghost credits represent nearly one in three credits issued through California’s primary forest offset program, highlighting systemic flaws in the rules and suggesting widespread gaming of the market.
“Our work shows that California’s forest offsets program increases greenhouse gas emissions, despite being a large part of the state’s strategy for reducing climate pollution,” said Danny Cullenward, the policy director at CarbonPlan. “The program creates the false appearance of progress when in fact it makes the climate problem worse.”
The Air Resources Board defended the program and disputed the central thesis of the study.
“We disagree with your statement that landowners or project developers are gaming the system or that there are inflated estimates” of greenhouse gas reductions, Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for the Air Resources Board, said in an email. Each version of the offset rules “went through our robust public regulatory review process,” with input from the forestry industry, academia, government agencies and nonprofits, he added.
California’s forest offset program is the largest in the country that is government-regulated. Other forest offset programs are voluntary, allowing businesses or individuals to purchase credits to shrink their environmental footprint.
CarbonPlan’s study comes days after the Washington state legislature moved a cap-and-trade bill with an offset program to the governor’s desk for approval. Oregon has also debated in recent months establishing a carbon market program that would emulate California’s policy. In Washington, D.C., the Biden administration has signaled growing interest in harnessing forests and soil to draw down CO2. Businesses, too, increasingly plan to rely heavily on trees to offset their emissions in lieu of the harder task of cutting corporate pollution.
Forest offsets have been criticized for a variety of problems, including the risks that the carbon reductions will be short-lived, that carbon savings will be wiped out by increased logging elsewhere, and that the projects are preserving forests never in jeopardy of being chopped down, producing credits that don’t reflect real-world changes in carbon levels.
But CarbonPlan’s analysis highlights a different issue, one interlinked with these other problems. Even if everything else about a project were perfect, developers would still be able to undermine the program by exploiting regional averages.
Every time a polluter uses a credit that didn’t actually save a ton of carbon, the total amount of emissions goes up.
Far from addressing climate change, California’s forest offsets appear to be adding tens of millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere on balance, undermining progress on the state’s long-term emissions goals.
“When you strip away all the jargon, you’re left with a faulty set of assumptions that leave the door wide open to issuing meaningless offset credits,” said Grayson Badgley, a postdoctoral fellow at Black Rock Forest and Columbia University, and the lead researcher on the study.
Cherry-Picking
CarbonPlan provided ProPublica and MIT Technology Review full and exclusive access to their analysis as it was being finalized. As part of that process, the news organizations sent the report to independent experts for review. The organizations also interviewed landowners, industry players and scientists and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including the project plans submitted by developers. CarbonPlan collaborated on the study with academic experts from the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University and other institutions.
The study itself wasn’t designed to assess whether developers or landowners are intentionally cherry-picking sites that stand out from regional averages, stating only that the system “allows for” developers to select such land. But the researchers themselves say that the level of excess crediting and the clustering of projects in certain areas suggest that industry players have gamed the system.
One form of cherry-picking identified by the researchers involves geographic boundaries. In the case of Northern California, the state’s offset program established a dividing line that separates that coastal strip of redwoods and Douglas firs from an inland region that spans more than 28,000 square miles.
The board’s rules state that tall mixed-conifer forests in the coastal region store an average of 205 tons of carbon per acre. For the neighboring inland region, the agency set the corresponding regional average at 122 tons per acre. The figure is lower because it includes more trees with less carbon, such as Ponderosa pines, which dominate the eastern end of the inland region and are all but absent on the coast.
But where the two regions meet, the forest on either side is virtually identical in many places, storing similar amounts of carbon. That means a project developer can earn far more money by choosing a site just east of the border, simply because they can compare the carbon in their forest against a lower regional average. For instance, maintaining a 10,000-acre forest of coastal redwoods and Douglas firs with carbon levels of 200 tons per acre could earn zero credits west of the line, or 624,000 credits east of it. The choice is between no money and more than $8 million.
To claim the most credits possible, for the full difference between the carbon on their land and the regional averages, developers or landowners must show that it’s legally and financially feasible to log down to those regional averages. The averages are effectively a stand-in for the way that similar forests are typically managed in an area.
A dozen projects are located in Northern California, almost entirely lined up along the western edge of the inland zone where the carbon-rich trees are juxtaposed against the lower regional average.
“What we’re seeing is developers are taking advantage of the fact that the big stuff and the scrubby stuff have been averaged together,” Badgley said.
Once an offset project developer and landowner decide to work together, the developer will generally shepherd them through the process in exchange for a fee or share of the sales of the credits generated — an arrangement that can be worth millions of dollars.
One of the most prolific project developers in the California system is an Australia-based timberlands investment company called New Forests. The company and its affiliates have worked on eight projects located almost entirely along the advantageous side of the border, as well as six elsewhere. CarbonPlan, in a separate analysis done for the news organizations that wasn’t included in the study, found that nearly all earned dubious credits, adding up to as much as $176 million worth.
A large share of those credits came from a single project outside California that profited from a glaring mistake in the rules. New Forests’ affiliate, Forest Carbon Partners, helped the Mescalero Apache Tribe develop a forest offset project in New Mexico. The project earned 3.7 million credits worth more than $50 million, largely because it was located in an area where the Air Resources Board had set an erroneously low regional average.
Another form of cherry-picking involves tree species: Developers can seek out tracts with particular trees that store far more carbon than the surrounding region.
According to the study, one project in Alaska consists almost entirely of giant Sitka spruces, yet the local regional average was calculated from a wide mix of trees, including species like cottonwoods that store far less carbon. The project earned significantly more credits than it should have due to the flaws in the system, the study said. The project owner didn’t return requests for comment.
Preserving especially carbon-rich forests is good for the climate, in and of itself. But when the trees in the project area bear little resemblance to the types of trees that went into calculating the regional average, it exaggerates the number of credits at stake, CarbonPlan’s study found.
Mark Trexler, a former offsets developer who worked in earlier U.S. and European carbon markets, said the board should have anticipated the perverse incentives created by its program.
“When people write offset rules, they always ignore the fact that there are 1,000 smart people next door that will try to game them,” he said. Since the board set up a system that “incentivizes people to find the areas that are high-density, or high-carbon, that’s what they’re going to do.”
To estimate the extent of overcrediting in California’s program, CarbonPlan calculated its own version of regional averages for each project. The researchers drew on the same raw data used by the Air Resources Board, but only used data from tree species that more closely resemble the particular mix of trees in each project area.
In total, 74 such projects had been established as of September 2020, when CarbonPlan began its research. CarbonPlan was able to study 65 projects that had enough documentation to make analysis possible. All received credits for holding more carbon than the regional average.
The researchers found that the vast majority of projects were over-credited, but about a dozen would have received more credits under CarbonPlan’s formula. Those included two New Forests projects, which would have earned as much as an additional 165,000 credits.
The news organizations sent officials at the Air Resources Board a copy of the study and its detailed methodology weeks before publication. Clegern declined multiple requests to interview board staff and responded only in writing.
He did not address CarbonPlan’s calculations. “We were not given sufficient time to fully analyze an unpublished study and are not commenting further on the authors’ alternative methodology,” he wrote.
The outside scientists who reviewed the research on behalf of ProPublica and MIT Technology Review praised the study.
“It’s a really analytically robust paper and it answers a really important policy question,” said Daniel Sanchez, who runs the Carbon Removal Laboratory at UC-Berkeley. While close observers are well aware of numerous problems with California’s forest offset rules, “they’re revealing a deeper set of serious methodological flaws,” he said.
None of the reviewers pointed out any major technical or conceptual flaws with the paper, which has been submitted to a journal for peer review.
‘A Significant New Commodity Market’
In early 2015, an offsets nonprofit hosted a webinar highlighting how Native American tribes could participate in California’s program.
One speaker was Brian Shillinglaw, a Stanford-trained lawyer and managing director at New Forests who oversees the company’s U.S. forestry programs. The company manages the sale of carbon credits, sells timber and on behalf of investors manages more than 2 million acres of forests globally, a portfolio it values at more than $4 billion.
New Forests also manages its affiliate, Forest Carbon Partners, on behalf of an institutional investment client it declined to name. Forest Carbon Partners finances offset projects and shepherds landowners through the process of applying for California’s offset program.
“The bottom line is the California carbon market has really created a significant new commodity market,” Shillinglaw said during his presentation. He said the program is something “many Native American tribes are very well situated to benefit from, in part due to past conservative stewardship of their forests, which can lead to significant credit yield in the near term.”
Translation: Because many tribes have logged less aggressively than their neighbors, their carbon-rich forests were primed for big payouts of credits. Under Shillinglaw, New Forests or Forest Carbon Partners have helped to secure tens of millions of dollars’ worth of credits for native tribes.
Among the 13 New Forests projects that CarbonPlan researchers were able to analyze, between 33% and 71% of the credits don’t represent real carbon reductions. That’s nearly 13 million credits at the high end.
“Although we cannot prove that New Forests acted deliberately on the basis of our statistical analysis, in our judgment there is no reasonable explanation for these outcomes other than that New Forests knowingly engaged in cherry-picking behavior to take advantage of ecological shortcomings in the forest offset protocol,” said Badgley, the lead researcher.
New Forests managed the first official project in California’s program, registering 7,660 acres of forest land on or near the Yurok Reservation, which runs more than 40 miles along the Klamath River near the top of that West Coast cluster of projects. The state issued more than 700,000 credits to the project for its first year, worth $9.6 million at recent rates.
State officials have pointed to the tribe’s participation as a triumph of the program. In 2014, the board released a promotional video that showed the meticulous work of measuring trees in the Yurok project. James Erler, the tribe’s then-forestry director, explained how offsets enabled the tribe to reduce logging. Near the end of the video, Shillinglaw appears in a sunlit forest, wearing a collared shirt and a New Forests-branded jacket.
“It’s a beautiful watershed,” Shillinglaw said over footage of a running stream and an elk standing before a thicket of trees. “This is the Yurok Tribe’s ancestral homeland, and in part due to the carbon market will be managed through a conservation approach.”
CarbonPlan estimates the project earned more than half a million ghost credits worth nearly $6.5 million.
Here’s why the researchers say it was over credited:
The boundary dividing California’s coastal and inland regions runs through the middle of the reservation. The carbon-rich forests on either side of that line are similar, filled with large Douglas firs like most of the coastal region. But more than 99% of the forest designated for preservation falls within the inland zone, where average carbon levels are much lower. The fact that the project was located in the most carbon-rich area of that zone enabled the landowners to earn an exaggerated number of credits.
At least one person involved in the Yurok Tribe’s forest offset efforts was aware of how geographical choices swing the credits that can be earned.
Erler said during a 2015 presentation at a National Indian Timber Symposium that the tribe had the “distinct pleasure” of having the boundary run through its territory.
“You can take the same inventory data and apply it to the California Coast” — the region to the west — “and it doesn’t come out with the same numbers as you do if you cross the street,” Erler said at the conference, captured in a YouTube video posted to the Intertribal Timber Council’s channel. “Vegetation may be the same, but it changes.”
Badgley said that while the researchers can’t speak to the intentions of any actors involved, it’s clear that this project “benefited from over-crediting and that the Yurok Tribe’s forester was aware how the specific aspects of the protocol rules our study criticizes led to beneficial outcomes.”
Erler didn’t respond to a list of emailed questions.
In an emailed statement, Yurok spokesperson Matt Mais said that the property was the only land the tribe had available to enroll at the time and strongly denied the tribe engaged in any sort of gaming of the system. He didn’t respond before press time to a subsequent inquiry asking why the rest of the tribe’s land wasn’t available for the offset program.
Over the last decade or so, the tribe has slowly reacquired tens of thousands of acres of its ancestral territory, in and around the watershed of Blue Creek and other streams that sustain migrating salmon, from the Green Diamond Resource Company, a major Seattle-based timber business. The complex multistep land deals were done in partnership with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy and financed through government grants, philanthropic donations and the sale of the tribe’s offset credits.
“As we have recovered additional forestlands, we have enrolled additional acreage in California’s climate programs in support of our Tribe’s strategic goals including protecting salmon habitat, sustaining the revitalization of our cultural lifeways, and facilitating economic self-sufficiency,” Mais wrote.
“It’s insulting to claim that the Yurok Tribe has ‘gamed’ or ‘exploited’ California’s climate regulations,” he added. “Equally important, it’s concerning that elite institutions now criticize us for legally and ethically using a program that was created to protect mature forests and then using those funds to purchase and restore more forest land that was, at one point, ours.”
New Forests defended its practices in emailed responses to questions, arguing its projects have preserved existing carbon stocks and removed CO2 from the atmosphere through subsequent tree growth “as confirmed via third-party verification.”
In a statement, the company said it has worked on projects in numerous areas, not just along the program’s regional boundaries. The company said its projects “have protected and will enhance carbon storage on hundreds of thousands of acres of forests,” adding that one project with the Chugach Alaska Corporation enabled the permanent retirement of a significant portion of the coal reserves in the Bering River Coal Field in southeastern Alaska.
New Forests follows the board’s “scientifically-accepted regulations to both the spirit and letter of the program,” the company said in a subsequent statement. “New Forests is proud of the forest carbon projects we have developed under California’s climate programs — they have generated positive environmental impact and furthered the economic and cultural objectives of the family forest landowners and Native American tribes with whom we have worked.”
New Forests didn’t respond to numerous additional inquiries, including direct questions about whether it was gaming the rules of the program.
In an emailed response, CarbonPlan stressed that its paper criticizes the design of the program — not the Yurok Tribe or other landowners. Nor does it allege anyone has broken the rules. Its analysis doesn’t consider or depend on the intent of any forest owners, who can benefit from flaws in the rules whether they intended to or even know about them.
“We recognize the injustices experienced by the Yurok Tribe, including the seizure of their historical lands by the United States government and its citizens,” the nonprofit stated. “We also recognize the Yurok Tribe’s legitimate interest in securing resources to repurchase lands that previously belonged to the Tribe and its people.”
An Open Secret
Chris Field, an environmental studies professor at Stanford University, was co-author of a 2017 study that found California’s program was helping to prevent emissions on balance by reducing logging. About 64% of the 39 projects studied were “being actively logged at or prior to project inception.”
Field said the state program is “relatively well-designed to address key issues,” but said it can and should be improved.
He added that there are firm limits on the role that offsets can play in California. From now through 2025, state polluters can only buy offsets to cover as much as 4% of their carbon emissions; from 2026 to 2030, that ceiling rises to 6%.
But those numbers understate the critical role of offsets in California’s cap-and-trade program, viewed by some as a model for market-based climate policy.
Under that program, California sells permits that allow certain industries to emit greenhouse gases, with each permit worth one metric ton of CO2. The state also regularly gives away a certain number of permits to various regulated companies. The total number of permits, called a “cap,” declines over time.
Polluters can also purchase permits from other companies with extras to spare, which constitutes the “trade.” Or they can buy carbon offset credits, which cost slightly less than permits.
To participate in the offset program, landowners must hire technicians to survey the trees on their land, then take data such as tree type, height and diameter and plug it into equations to estimate the carbon stored per acre.
Most of the credits are distributed during the initial stages of a project, which can help to repay setup costs. Projects can also earn additional credits over time as the trees grow and absorb CO2, but those credits accrue slowly, and are dwarfed by the initial credits given to forests with more carbon than the regional average.
The type of forest projects that CarbonPlan analyzed account for 68% of all credits issued by the Air Resources Board since the program’s launch, far eclipsing other types of offsets like capturing methane from dairy farms or coal mines, CarbonPlan found.
Cap and trade is designed to slash the state’s carbon footprint by 236 million tons of CO2 over the next decade, about a third of the cumulative reductions needed to meet the state’s emissions targets over that time.
Barbara Haya, who leads the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at UC-Berkeley and is a co-author of the CarbonPlan study, calculated that up to half of those cap-and-trade emissions cuts could come via offsets.
Haya said these cherry-picking practices have been an open secret. The study is “revealing to everyone what a lot of people in the industry understand,” she said.
Conservation vs. the Climate
Supporters of forest offsets say no system is perfect, and that focusing solely on the carbon math overlooks the incentives offsets create for protecting forests.
Field said offset systems should balance two goals: ensuring real emissions cuts, and creating ways to fund forest conservation. If CarbonPlan’s study shows projects are gravitating toward high-carbon forests, then those are exactly the types of trees you’d want to save “if you have a conservation agenda,” he said.
Cody Desautel, president of the Intertribal Timber Council, a Portland-based nonprofit consortium of native tribes, said that offset programs have provided critical financial flexibility for tribes. They’ve allowed them to buy back historic land, build needed infrastructure, create jobs for members or simply save up money for financial security. But above all, they’ve created incentives to manage forests in sustainable ways, he said.
“Tribes are very conservation-minded,” said Desautel, who is also the natural resources director for Washington’s Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which operate an offset project under California’s system. “Their practices are largely based on what’s best for the ecosystem, not what makes the most sense economically. And there’s never been any value to that management approach in the past. These carbon projects provide an opportunity to value that.”
He added, “If there’s no value to owning forest land, it probably won’t be forest land long into the future.”
The Yurok Tribe’s offset projects have clearly helped in these sorts of ways, even if they didn’t provide the full promised carbon benefit.
The tribe has said it is using the acquired land and funds to restore its old-growth forests, produce traditional foods and basket-weaving materials, create a salmon sanctuary and improve habitat for endangered or culturally important species like the coho salmon, northern spotted owl, blacktailed deer and Roosevelt elk.
“Our partnership with New Forests will provide the Tribe with the means to boost biodiversity, accelerate watershed restoration, and increase the abundance of important cultural resources like acorns, huckleberry and hundreds of medicinal plants that thrive in a fully functioning forest ecosystem,” Thomas P. O’Rourke Sr., then-chairman of the Yurok Tribal Council, said in a statement at the time.
But if the societal goal is preserving forests, it would be simpler and more effective to describe it accurately and fund it directly, said Haya, the UC-Berkeley expert. As soon as these forests get tied up in an offset program, the carbon math does matter, because every additional ton purportedly preserved in trees enables polluters to purchase the right to generate an additional ton of CO2.
Forest offsets appeal to the public partly because of what academics call “charismatic carbon” — they offer a feel-good story of environmental and social good.
“Any good conservation advocate would tell you there’s a desperate need for more funding, and we agree entirely,” CarbonPlan’s Cullenward said in an email. The “problem isn’t that conservation is bad, it’s that the system of carbon offsets channels these real needs and sincere hopes into a system that grinds it all up and spits out garbage on the other side.”
“The Best Bang for the Buck”
California’s Air Resources Board approved the forest offset program’s official rules in 2011, after years of discussions with dozens of experts, including government scientists and staff from conservation groups.
In adopting it, the agency relied heavily on Climate Action Reserve, a nonprofit that created programs with voluntary offset credits. The nonprofit, which continues to advise the agency, led an effort to calculate regional carbon averages as part of an initiative to update its voluntary offset rules.
To do so, the nonprofit used data from the U.S. Forest Service, which surveys tens of thousands of forest plots nationwide. The nonprofit grouped data from different tree species and combined data from various geographic zones into larger regional areas called supersections. This simplification allowed the Climate Action Reserve to create a set of common baselines that estimated the amount of carbon stored in typical privately owned forests. The baselines take into account such forest uses as logging.
But the use of these broad averages obscured real differences on the ground. Some industry insiders and researchers began to notice that landowners and developers routinely located their projects in areas where the specific tract of forest differed greatly from the regional averages.
Zack Parisa, chief executive of the carbon offsets company SilviaTerra, previously consulted for project developers and landowners enrolling forests in California’s system. But he said he stopped out of frustration, after seeing the ways it was regularly being gamed, including the cherry-picking techniques CarbonPlan highlighted.
Parisa said he doesn’t blame landowners or project developers, who are acting out of rational self-interest.
“If someone shows up and is offering a contract to buy carbon and it doesn’t require them to change anything about how they manage the forests, that’s free money and they’d be stupid not to take it,” he said.
“I’m not hunting for a villain here,” Parisa added. “Of course they look for the best bang for the buck.”
In addition to New Forests, other developers also worked on projects where favorable boundaries and forest types boosted the credits that could be earned, according to CarbonPlan. Those include Bluesource and Finite Carbon, which BP purchased a majority stake in late last year. The researchers found that those two developers’ projects, taken together, generated up to 24 million credits that don’t represent actual carbon reductions.
New Forests, Finite Carbon, Bluesource and other subjects of this article were provided the full study and an accompanying paper describing its methods.
Finite Carbon declined to address detailed questions, but stressed that the Air Resources Board and an independent auditor found that their projects were in compliance with the rules.
In a statement, the company said there were “unanswered questions” about the CarbonPlan study’s methodology, adding, “however we cannot comment further on it as the underlying raw data is not currently available for public review.”
Emily Six, the marketing and communications manager for Bluesource, denied the company had gamed the rules in any way.
In an email, Six said California’s program actually undercounts the carbon preserved through projects by not crediting the amount stored in other parts of the forest like soil, shrubs and foliage. She also stressed that without offsets, some landowners could have chopped down their forests to carbon levels well below the regional average.
“Deliberately overstating climate benefits would run counter to our very purpose for existence,” she wrote. “Bluesource exists to improve the world by improving the environment.”
The experts who wrote the original offset rules relied on the only national forest dataset available, from the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, said Constance Best, co-founder of the Pacific Forest Trust. The conservation nonprofit was closely involved in the creation of the early program and participated in it.
Best said it was necessary to create carbon averages for larger regions and forest types because there wasn’t enough fine-grained data to ensure accuracy at highly local levels. She disputed CarbonPlan’s claim that its researchers had created a better way of calculating regional averages, since their method required relying on a smaller number of forest plots.
“The reason some super sections are large is to assure the data is more accurate,” Best said in an email. “So their solution creates more problems.”
In a separate note, she said: “The paper you shared has a strong editorial bias that undermines its findings and makes me question their data and analysis. It deliberately exaggerates what they present as smoking gun over-credited projects.”
In an emailed statement, CarbonPlan acknowledges that using fewer forest plots entails some uncertainty. But the researchers stressed they clearly accounted for it by providing a range of results, and maintained their findings are more accurate because they considered the specific mix of tree species in each project. CarbonPlan also shot back at the allegation of bias: “Having done our work on the basis of extensive public program records, and with fully reproducible methods, data, and code, we are confident that other researchers are capable of judging our paper on its merits.”
While the board has updated regional averages based on more recent forest data, critics say efforts to address more fundamental problems have been thwarted.
Researchers and activists also worry about the close ties between the Air Resources Board and the groups that now profit from the program.
For example, whenever a landowner wants to enroll a forest tract in California’s program, they open an account at Climate Action Reserve or two other nonprofits that have received the board’s blessing to review the documents.
If the project clears the Climate Action Reserve’s review and a subsequent audit by the state board, the nonprofit charges 19 cents for every credit issued. For one of the largest projects in the program, for instance, that would have added up to more than $1 million.
It “strikes me as a massive conflict of interest for an organization — whether nonprofit or not — that designed the system to have a financial stake in its operation,” David Victor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has closely studied international offset systems, said in an email. (Victor recently co-authored the book “Making Climate Policy Work” with Cullenward.)
“In any other market, putting the market players in charge of key elements of its design would lead to ‘hollers’” over the conflicts of interest, Victor said. With the forest offset program, “everyone seems fine or even happy about the arrangement.”
Climate Action Reserve didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘Too Good to Be True’
Hardy, drought-tolerant softwoods like junipers and pinyon pines dominate in the hot, dry landscape of central New Mexico, with smatterings of taller Douglas firs and spruces in the cooler, higher reaches of the mountains.
But under the initial rules of California’s program, those forests were considered to contain no carbon whatsoever.
The error stemmed from the fact that there was no available Forest Service data in that part of New Mexico when the Climate Action Reserve calculated regional averages, said Olaf Kuegler, a Forest Service statistician who provided technical assistance to the nonprofit on the federal database.
Consequently, the Climate Action Reserve set the regional average for an area stretching nearly 34,000 square miles at zero, which meant anyone who owned a few dozen trees could earn carbon credits.
Kuegler said he wasn’t aware of the mistake until early or mid-2014, when Air Resources Board employee Barbara Bamberger asked him about it. Bamberger, who leads the board’s work on forest offsets, later highlighted the error during an October 2014 webinar on offsets.
During her presentation, Bamberger said the board was updating the regional averages in ways that could lead to major changes in certain areas.
“This may be due to the fact that no data existed for some years in the original span from years 2002 to 2006,” she explained. “For example, in New Mexico data wasn’t collected until the end of that period.”
Almost exactly one year after Bamberger’s presentation, New Forests’ affiliate filed the paperwork for a nearly 222,000-acre project in New Mexico, stretching across the Mescalero Apache Tribe’s nearly half-million-acre reservation about ninety minutes west of Roswell. More than a third of the project’s trees were carbon-rich Douglas firs, according to the project’s paperwork. Shillinglaw signed the forms.
The erroneously low carbon calculation allowed the developer to claim they could have heavily logged the forest, boosting the amount of credits they could earn.
The project earned 3.7 million credits for its first year, worth more than $50 million.
When the California board’s updated rules went into effect two weeks later, it set a far higher regional average for most of the project area. If that standard had been in place earlier, it would have eliminated nearly every credit the project earned, CarbonPlan found. The project generated more ghost credits than any other in the nonprofit’s study, based on its more conservative calculations of regional carbon averages.
The Mescalero Apache Tribe’s president at the time, Danny Breuninger Sr., said the tribe welcomed the project.
“None of us had heard about the carbon credit program, and in a way it sounded too good to be true,” he said. “But it was a great deal. It worked out great for us.”
Breuninger referred further questions to the tribe’s current president, Gabe Aguilar. Neither Aguilar nor the tribe’s attorney, Nelva Cervantes, responded to repeated inquiries.
In a statement, the Air Resources Board said the project met all the requirements of the program at that time. The fact that the board was in the process of developing new regional averages using data that didn’t previously exist didn’t make the earlier figures “invalid or erroneous,” it added.
‘A Second Wave of Colonization’
Ghost credits matter because they allow other companies to purchase the right to continue emitting real greenhouse gases.
Credits from the Mescalero Apache Tribe’s project were sold to PG&E, Chevron and a company that drills for oil in Kern County, California, according to the latest figures available.
The Yurok Tribe’s 7,660-acre project generated credits that were obtained by a variety of energy companies like Calpine, PG&E and Shell.
Some tribal members are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of selling offsets to companies like this even if they are legitimate, fearing they’re effectively profiting from pollution.
The offsets, by definition, allow California companies to continue producing more CO2 than otherwise allowed — as well as the toxic pollutants like soot and heavy metals that frequently accompany such emissions — often near poor neighborhoods. Communities near refineries, cement kilns and power plants have frequently opposed offset programs.
Thomas Joseph, an activist and a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in California, said offset developers target tribal projects because tribes are in “dire need of revenue” and own vast tracts of mostly intact forest. He said his tribe has resisted multiple pitches from developers. “For us to use this as a means to allow corporations to continue to pollute,” he said, goes “against our cultural values.” He added, “I see it as a second wave of colonization.”
Desautel, the Intertribal Timber Council president, sees it differently. When the issue comes up among tribal members, he explains that polluters under cap and trade need to pay either the state for permission to pollute, or landowners through carbon offsets.
“The check is getting written one way or the other,” he said. “It’s just a question of where it goes and what’s being accomplished with that funding.”
SilviaTerra’s Parisa said that landowners and project developers will continue to respond to the incentives created in the program, in ways that overstate climate progress, until the program itself changes.
“We need better rules,” he said. “Let’s make sure the dollars we spend actually change things.
“Forests really can be a part of the solution for the climate, but we haven’t gotten it right yet.”
How We Calculated Offset Credits and Their Monetary Value
The value of the credits throughout these stories was calculated using the fourth quarter 2020 average price for all offsets in California’s system ($13.67). The actual amount of money earned by landowners, developers and other actors in the system will depend on when the credits were sold, how many were sold and how many they had to contribute to the program’s insurance “buffer” pool. These are private transactions, and the specific terms aren’t provided to outsiders.
When the Air Resources Board issues credits to a project, about 20% of those credits go into the pool. Credits in the pool can never be sold, but act as a kind of backstop in case of wildfires, drought and other events. For instance, if a fire burned up part of a forest located on a project site, resulting in one million tons of CO2 released into the air, then a million credits would be removed from the buffer pool to account for the loss.
Our story includes buffer pool credits when describing the credits issued to a group of projects, as all of those credits affect the integrity of California’s offset program. We exclude buffer pool credits when calculating the credits earned by any single project and their monetary worth.
How We Put Together Our Maps
The first map depicts the common practice (per-acre regional average) for the Northern California Coast Supersection, Redwood/Douglas-fir Mixed Conifer assessment area (high site class), and the Southern Cascades Supersection, Mixed Conifer assessment area (high site class), based on the Air Resources Board’s 2015 Compliance Offset Protocol. The second and third maps show what is effectively the common practice for each ecosection within the Southern Cascades Supersection; CarbonPlan calculated the numbers using data from the Air Resources Board and the U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program. The third map omits one additional project on the California-Oregon border. That project had initial carbon levels below the regional average, and was not included in CarbonPlan’s study.
How We Got the Story
ProPublica and MIT Technology Review decided to collaborate on this project because of our respective track records of reporting on carbon offsets. In 2019, ProPublica reporter Lisa Song wrote about problems with international forest offsets and California’s cap-and-trade program. Separately, Technology Review editor James Temple spent much of 2019 and 2020 reporting on the promises and challenges of carbon removal efforts, including the Air Resources Board’s compliance carbon offset program. Both Song and Temple had independently interviewed several co-authors of the CarbonPlan report for their respective stories.
In late 2020, when CarbonPlan was partway through its analysis, study co-author Danny Cullenward pitched the study as a story to Technology Review. Temple then contacted Song to discuss a reporting partnership. We decided that such a complex, technical story would benefit from a newsroom collaboration.
Cullenward, a lecturer at Stanford Law School and CarbonPlan’s policy director, had studied California’s climate policy system for years. In 2019, Cullenward and ecologist Grayson Badgley, his former colleague from the Carnegie Institution for Science, decided to analyze the state’s offset program in a comprehensive way after attending a workshop where they learned more about how the program’s rules were designed. (Cullenward is also vice-chair of the Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee, a group of experts convened by the California Environmental Protection Agency to advise the Air Resources Board on cap and trade. Cullenward said his work at CarbonPlan doesn’t speak for the committee.)
In early 2020, Cullenward joined the startup CarbonPlan. The nonprofit assesses the scientific integrity of carbon removal efforts. That includes various types of carbon offsets, as well as emerging technologies that remove CO2 from the air. CarbonPlan receives project-specific funding from companies and other organizations. For instance, Stripe paid CarbonPlan to evaluate different carbon removal options.
Microsoft also paid CarbonPlan to study how climate change would affect the ability of forests to mitigate global warming. CarbonPlan used part of that funding to digitize the forest carbon offset project documents in California’s program. Badgley, a postdoctoral fellow at Black Rock Forest and Columbia University, digitized those records and was paid as a consultant by CarbonPlan.
CarbonPlan then used separate unrestricted funding (from various individuals and foundations) to study those projects, working with Badgley and other scientists including Barbara Haya, who leads the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at UC-Berkeley.
Its study is focused on the primary form of forest offsets in California’s program, called Improved Forest Management. These IFM projects reward landowners for managing their forests in ways that prevent further emissions or absorb more carbon over time.
In part because the study hadn’t been submitted to a scientific journal, which would include a formal peer review process, we took added steps to check its quality. First, we did a gut check and interviewed several forest experts about the report’s premise. CarbonPlan didn’t yet have final numbers on the scope of the over crediting, but academics we talked to said that using regional carbon averages created the possibility of awarding excess credits and incentivizing cherry-picking.
Weeks later, when CarbonPlan completed a draft, we sent it to several outside scientists for a detailed review, including Heather Lynch, Professor of Ecology & Evolution at Stony Brook University, and a member of ProPublica’s data advisory board; Dan Sanchez, who directs the Carbon Removal Laboratory at UC-Berkeley; and David Valentine, Chair of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
These scientists are all experts on forests, climate change, the carbon cycle and/or carbon removal. They all have at least a general understanding of California’s offsets, but do not work for offset developers.
We also sent the study to a fourth scientist, Hunter Stanke, a Ph.D. student in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. Stanke developed the rFIA software that CarbonPlan used in its analysis. The software analyzes raw data from the Forest Service’s Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, often used by academics, government agencies and timber companies for purposes unrelated to offsets. Before the newsrooms sent Stanke the study, he had provided technical assistance on rFIA to the lead author of the CarbonPlan study, but he wasn’t aware CarbonPlan was using the software to study offsets.
All four scientists praised the study and its methodology. They asked for clarification on several technical details, which we sent to CarbonPlan. The nonprofit incorporated some minor suggestions into its final draft, but said the changes didn’t alter the overall findings.
CarbonPlan also conducted several analyses of its raw data on behalf of the reporters, including calculations of the level of excess crediting in projects that specific developers worked on.
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