Weeks earlier, Climate Extinction protesters wearing shirts reading “End Fossil Fuels” screeched and hollered during a US Open match at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens.
One even glued his feet to the floor, stalling the match between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova for 50 minutes, thousands of paying spectators be damned.
And who can forget the viral soup-slingers who splattered Van Gogh’s iconic “Sunflowers” painting at the National Gallery last fall? Or the PETA protester — her mostly naked body painted with the words “Coach Leather Kills” — who crashed the brand’s runway show at New York Fashion Week in early September?
I’m actually sympathetic to her cause — so much so that I haven’t eaten meat since I was 14 — and yet I am embarrassed by her tactics. Imagine how many others whose minds could be changed were turned off completely.
Sure, these stunts get headlines … but for all the wrong reasons. Who in their right mind looks at a Van Gogh covered in tomato chunks and thinks, “Maybe I should listen to what the people who did that have to say”?
It’s also churlish to take the spotlight away from runners who trained for months and traveled around the world to compete in a marathon, or athletes who spent a lifetime working their way to the US Open.
But when these stunts meaningfully disrupt the day-to-day functioning of society — that’s simply inexcusable.
In late August, climate protesters in Washington, DC, sat cross-legged blocking traffic along Interstate 396, a multi-lane highway. Was anyone surprised when furious commuters emerged from their cars to snatch away signs and demand these people move?
“I want to go to work! I want to go to work,” one driver shouted.
“Y’all can find a better way to protest,” another chimed in. “Y’all holding me up.”
“I have kids to feed, b—ch,” a woman shouted in the face of one stoic protester. “You don’t think we know the Earth is f—king melting?”
Disrupting innocent bystanders’ commute to work — or worse, their potentially life-saving ride in an ambulance — is absolutely unacceptable and entirely counterproductive.
I’m not alone in thinking these protests fail to change minds.
In fact, 46% of respondents said nonviolent disruptive protests decrease their support for efforts to address climate change, and a mere 13% said they increase them.
The West has a laudable history of protesting, from women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement.
That heritage has led generation after generation to pick up the mantle of civil disobedience with righteousness — so much so that the organization behind the DC highway debacle took to X, formerly Twitter, to say as much.
“For us,” Declare Emergency organizers wrote, “this was a great way to honor the legacy of Dr. King and to carry on his tradition of disruptive, nonviolent civil disobedience!”
But not all protests are created equal.
As much as these self-righteous agitators might like to fashion themselves as the successors of King’s legacy, the truth is they aren’t. Having petulant meltdowns while dripping with glue and soup simply doesn’t have the same effect.
About this investigation: The UN has long championed the need for urgent climate solutions. Yet its own actions – particularly its reliance on low-quality carbon offsets – undermine its leadership on fighting climate change. Building on our 2021 investigation that found the UN failed to count all of its emissions, The New Humanitarian teamed up with Mongabay, a US-based environmental news outlet, to investigate the UN’s claims of climate neutrality. In an investigation that took a year and spanned multiple countries, reporters obtained details about carbon credits purchased by 33 UN entities, representing more than 75% of its reported offset portfolio since 2012. More than a dozen of the projects that issued the UN’s carbon credits were linked to reports of environmental damage, displacement, or health concerns. Others were deemed worthless by a number of leading climate experts.
BANGKOK
The UN claims to be almost entirely climate neutral, yet that claim is based on buying millions of carbon offset credits that experts say do little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, The New Humanitarian and Mongabay found in a year-long investigation.
More than 2.7 million UN carbon credits – 40% of those reporters were able to analyse – were issued by hydropower and wind projects, which climate experts say shouldn’t be used to offset emissions as the schemes often don’t need income from credits to be viable.
In addition, at least 13 carbon offsetting projects that received UN funds have been linked to reports of environmental damage, displacement, or health problems – all issues the UN routinely works to prevent or mitigate.
One such project, the Teles Pires hydropower plant in Brazil, has drawn regular protests by communities and environmental groups who say the dam’s construction destroyed rainforests and Indigenous lands.
“It looks like there is little credibility in the UN’s [climate neutrality] claim based on the carbon credits that they have used,” said Gilles Dufrasne, of Carbon Market Watch, a watchdog group, referring to the high number of large-scale wind and hydropower credits in the UN’s portfolio. “I would qualify these as junk credits.”
At a glance: Why the UN’s claims don’t stack up
The UN has claimed to be at least 95% “climate neutral” every year since 2018, largely through the use of carbon credits.
Reporters tracked down the origins of more than 6.6 million credits that 33 UN entities purchased between 2012 and 2022 for nearly $8.5 million. Fifteen entities failed to respond or declined to share information, while several did not disclose their spending.
Of those credits, more than 2.7 million were issued by wind and hydropower projects, which many experts say fail to represent real emissions reductions. Offset certifiers like Gold Standard and Verra have restricted such projects due to quality concerns.
More than 350,000 credits were issued by 13 projects that have been implicated in displacement, environmental damage, and health concerns.
The UN spent an average of roughly $1.30 on each carbon credit, which experts say indicates low quality and is well below the norm.
Some NGOs like Médecins Sans Frontières have sworn off carbon offsets in favour of direct reductions. Others, like Oxfam UK, which still buys offset credits, say they do not treat the purchases as reductions to their emissions or use them to claim climate neutrality.
The investigation, which spanned multiple countries, is one of the first to peer into the UN’s carbon offset portfolio, which has not previously been made public.
Reporters also found that many UN entities had little knowledge or oversight of the carbon credits they were purchasing. Many were also purchased at rock-bottom prices – bargains that experts say should raise red flags.
UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Environment David Boyd called the investigation’s findings “very troubling” and urged the UN to launch an independent inquiry into its offset purchases, with results to be made public.
Most UN entities referred questions about their carbon credit purchases to the UN’s climate change oversight body – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat. UNFCCC did not respond to detailed questions about this investigation’s findings but said UN entities purchase credits “randomly” and “do not discriminate between them”.
The UN is hardly the biggest offender when it comes to claims of climate neutrality or greenhouse gas emissions.
Roughly 100 companies are responsible for more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while a recent study of climate neutrality claims from 25 multinationals found most were overstated. British Airways and Delta Air Lines, for example, have faced particularly stringent criticism over their claims.
Still, climate researchers and environmental advocates say the UN’s offsetting practices undermine its leadership on efforts to slow the pace of global warming.
Aside from overseeing multiple climate treaties, the UN is also a steward in helping governments meet climate commitments under the Paris Agreement, organising the annual COP climate conferences. This year’s COP28 starts on 30 November in Dubai.
Even as millions of credits in the UN’s own portfolio fail to meet high standards, it has been urging other organisations to do better. Last year, a “high-level” UN expert group advised organisations to buy only “high-integrity credits” and to refrain from counting those credits as their own emissions reductions.
“I do think it matters what the UN does,” said Joe Romm, senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. “The UN is effectively overseeing the world’s effort to address the climate problem.”
‘Unavoidable’ emissions
The UN set out to become climate neutral in 2007, when leaders agreed to reduce the world body’s emissions “to the extent possible”.
In 2014, then-UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon proclaimed: “We will be climate neutral by 2020.” The UN defines climate neutrality as balancing emissions so they are equal to or less than what the planet naturally absorbs.
Between 2018 and 2021, the UN said it had achieved near-total climate neutrality, despite reporting emissions of nearly 7 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide – roughly equal to the annual emissions of 1.5 million gasoline-powered cars.
This claim was only made possible by offsetting.
Other initiatives were also undertaken – pushing for renewable energy sources, hosting meetings online, and flying economy class instead of business – but none of those measures managed to bring significant emissions reductions, possibly due to increased staffing during the same five-year period.
In 2019, for example, the UN’s annual reported emissions were roughly equal to what they were in 2014: more than 2 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide.
In 2020, the UN’s reported emissions dropped below 1.5 million metric tonnes, but the reductions were largely attributed to travel restrictions and remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic.
And these figures only represent the emissions the UN actually includes.
A 2021 investigation by The New Humanitarian found that the UN failed to count all of its emissions, including indirect emissions – greenhouse gases emitted up and down its supply chain. Without knowing the UN’s total emissions, claims of climate neutrality, or even of emissions reductions, become difficult to prove.
“The UN’s neutrality claim lacks credibility and is particularly inappropriate coming from an agency overseeing global efforts to combat climate change,” said Lindsay Otis, a policy expert at Carbon Market Watch. “The [UN] should stop making misleading neutrality claims.”
The UN says many of its greenhouse gas emissions are unavoidable and need to be offset – at least in the short term.
But some other organisations have already forsworn carbon offsetting altogether. Last year, Médecins Sans Frontières published a roadmap for halving its emissions by 2030 without relying on carbon credits.
Oxfam UK, which does buy carbon credits, says it doesn’t use them to claim climate neutrality. Among commercial entities, both Gucci and Nestlé recently agreed to abandon “carbon neutral” claims on some brands.
Additionally, the EU has taken steps to prohibit corporate claims of climate neutrality that are based on unsubstantiated or unverified carbon offsetting programmes.
Switzerland’s advertising regulator also recently told the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) to refrain from describing the 2022 Qatar World Cup as climate neutral after research found the claim was largely based on offsets from renewable energy projects.
Responding to the UN’s reliance on these types of credits, Romm said: “Their [climate neutrality] claims would be ruled false in any court in the world… They’re utterly meaningless.”
But the UN is largely exempt from regulatory oversight, and because of its many entities and siloed operations, its offset portfolio has remained unexamined.
For this investigation, however, reporters were able to trace the origins of more than 6.6 million credits, representing more than 75% of the UN’s entire 2012-2022 offset portfolio, according to calculations based on the UN’s annual emissions reports and purchase records provided by UN entities.
The credits were issued by some 700 projects and purchased by 33 of the 48 UN entities that claim to be climate neutral. The UN spent nearly $8.5 million on carbon credits between 2012 and 2022, according to data the UN provided.
Fifteen entities failed to respond or declined to share information. Several of those that provided offset purchase records did not say how much their credits cost. Eighteen entities told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay they didn’t have their own purchase records and referred requests to the UNFCCC secretariat.
Do no harm
Of the credits the UN purchased between 2012 and 2022, more than 350,000 were issued by at least 13 projects that were linked to reports of environmental destruction, forced displacement, or health problems in communities near the projects.
UN entities spent more than $400,000 on these credits, according to information provided by the entities that made the purchases.
For instance, the UN Secretariat – the UN’s administrative arm headed by Secretary-General António Guterres – bought nearly 4,000 credits in 2021 from the Okhla waste-to-energy plant, an Indian project that has sparked environmental and health concerns.
Located in New Delhi’s Sukhdev Vihar neighbourhood, it claims to reduce emissions by burning organic waste to heat pressure boilers that drive steam turbines and generate electricity.
Community residents, however, have challenged the project in the courts for more than a decade, claiming the plant’s incinerators are fed mixed waste, including plastic, rather than organic waste, causing them to emit toxic pollution near their homes.
Air pollution tests submitted to an Indian environmental court in 2020 confirmed emissions of harmful particles well above the permissible limit, according to research by the New Delhi-based Centre for Financial Accountability.
Chanchal Pal, an ear, nose, and throat specialist at the Apollo 24/7 hospital – located around 200 metres from the Okhla facility – said she believes cases of bronchitis, lung diseases, asthma, nasal polyps, and sinus problems among people living in the area are linked to pollution from the plant.
“When plastics are burnt, it has carcinogenic effects on human health – this is a scientific fact,” Pal told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay.
Residents have also pointed out that the plant’s 40-metre proximity to some homes violates government guidelines requiring landfills to be at least 500 metres from residential areas.
Ranjit Devraj, a Sukhdev Vihar resident and former member of a Supreme Court committee on waste management in Delhi, said locals live in fear of boiler explosions that could flatten their homes and claim lives.
“It is an environmental disaster in the making because this plant is supposed to be some sort of flagship for a policy of incinerating waste in India,” Devraj said.
Neither the Timarpur Okhla Waste Management Company, which the UN lists as a project operator, nor site manager Sandeep Dutt, responded to requests for comment.
13 projects in UN offset portfolio linked to displacement, environmental damage, and health concerns
The UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), meanwhile, spent roughly $100,000 in 2021 on nearly 29,000 credits issued by Brazil’s Teles Pires hydropower plant – a project accused of destroying forests and Indigenous lands, and of harming biodiversity and fisheries.
The companies involved blew up the Sete Quedas rapids with dynamite in 2013, two years before the project began issuing carbon credits.
“Teles Pires flooded the Sete Quedas rapids, which are the holiest site for the Munduruku people. It’s where the spirits of the respected elders go after they die,” said Philip Fearnside, a biologist at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia.
The project has also been linked to greenhouse gas emissions that undermine its offsetting claims.
A 2018 study published by the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil calculated that deforestation and decomposition of flooded forests caused by the dam would add more than 60 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere – more than double the amount it claims to reduce through the sale of carbon credits.
Neither WFP nor the Brazilian energy companies EQAO and Hidrelétrica Teles Pires, which the UN lists as the two participants in the project, responded to requests for comment.
‘Randomly assigned’
More than 1 million credits in the UN’s portfolio were issued by large-scale hydropower projects, which experts have criticised for decades for being particularly ineffective at reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
When asked about these purchases, multiple UN entities either did not respond or deferred responsibility to UNFCCC.
Most UN entities rely on UNFCCC to procure offset credits on their behalf – a reliance that raises questions about what responsibility, if any, UN entities have in conducting their own due diligence when vetting and buying carbon credits.
“The [UN] Secretariat does not choose the projects,” said UN Secretariat spokesperson Florencia Soto Niño. “These are allocated through UNFCCC and they have certain criteria for their selection. I suggest you reach out to UNFCCC on this matter.”
Deforestation and flooding around the Teles Pires hydropower plant between 2000 and 2020. Some of the visible environmental degradation may not have been caused by the dam’s construction or operations.
UN officials told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay that most UN entities outsource the procurement of carbon credits to UNFCCC, which in turn buys them from the Adaptation Fund.
The Adaptation Fund receives credits from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a UN-run offset certifier, and sells them to fund projects in countries trying to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.
Moses Osani, a spokesperson for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said the credits are “randomly assigned” by the Adaptation Fund to UNFCCC and then assigned again by UNFCCC to the purchasing UN entities.
Eighteen UN entities initially told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay they didn’t know which projects issued their credits, though most eventually requested records from UNFCCC and shared them with reporters.
“We do not have info ourselves about the specific projects where the money [was] invested,” said Marina Maiero, Technical Officer for Climate Change and Health at the World Health Organization, which did not provide transaction records to reporters.*
In theory, each carbon credit certified by the CDM should represent the reduction of one metric tonne of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A 2016 research paper published by the Germany-based Öko-Institut recommended that large-scale wind and hydropower projects be excluded from the CDM because of quality concerns.
A 2022 review of the CDM’s performance similarly pointed out that few wind and hydropower projects – large-scale or small-scale – achieved their emission reduction targets.
“If the money that you spend for the offset doesn’t have an impact on the outcome, then you can’t claim any credit for the outcome,” said Romm, the University of Pennsylvania climate researcher. “I don’t know why the UN would still be buying wind and hydro.”
Two UN officials told reporters there were limits on UN purchases of large-scale hydropower credits.
Osani, the UNEP spokesperson, said the mix of credits offered by the Adaptation Fund “excludes large-scale hydro” credits.
Dragoslav Jovanovic, head of the Procurement, Travel and General Services Unit at UNFCCC, said “certain large hydro” projects are meant to be excluded from what the Adaptation Fund can sell.
While some of the 1 million large-scale hydropower credits in the UN’s portfolio were purchased from other carbon credit markets, almost 900,000 were assigned to UN entities by UNFCCC, according to records UNFCCC and other entities provided, suggesting that unless they were using a different threshold, the exclusion was either being ignored or non-existent.
When asked whether large hydropower projects were meant to be excluded from UN purchases, Adaptation Fund spokesperson Matthew Pueschel declined to provide information, saying “all such transactions are proprietary”. He later added that all credits sold by the Adaptation Fund “are available for purchase in principle”.
Neither Osani nor Jovanovic responded to further questions on why almost 900,000 credits from large-scale hydropower projects were not excluded from UN purchases.
UNFCCC’s press office confirmed that “certain large hydro” projects were previously excluded from the Adaptation Fund’s credits but said “this criterion no longer applies”. They did not provide details on the threshold for exclusion or say when it was dropped.
This investigation found that UN entities purchased carbon credits from large-scale hydropower projects every year from 2014 to 2021.
Low ratings
While some experts questioned the effectiveness of the wind and hydropower credits in the UN’s portfolio generally, The New Humanitarian and Mongabay sought additional analysis from the London-based carbon credit ratings agency BeZero Carbon.
BeZero provides risk-based ratings, research, and analysis on carbon credits. Although it doesn’t specifically rate credits associated with UN entities, BeZero granted reporters access to its ratings platform to see its analysis of 23 projects that happen to be found in the UN’s portfolio.
Out of almost 300,000 credits the UN bought from these 23 projects, more than 60% were issued by projects that, according to BeZero, have a moderately low, low, or very low likelihood of achieving their stated greenhouse gas reductions.
UN entities spent almost $750,000 on these lowly rated projects. Wind and hydropower projects are among the lowest-rated.
For instance, BeZero gave a low rating to the Allain Duhangan Hydroelectric Project – an Indian dam that provided more than 39,000 credits to the UN Secretariat in 2021.
According to BeZero’s analysis, the preponderance of hydropower in the same region as the Allain Duhangan project “contrasts with the project’s claim to be first of its kind”, suggesting it would likely have been built regardless of revenue from carbon credits.
BeZero also gave low ratings to three Chinese wind power projects that supplied more than 24,000 credits to the UN Secretariat, WFP, and the UN Development Programme (UNDP).
All three ratings point out that wind power projects are financially viable on their own and are supported by governments, meaning they do not rely on carbon credit revenue and are therefore unlikely to be additional.
UNDP sustainability coordinator Anne Fernqvist told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay that BeZero’s ratings are statements of opinion, adding that UNDP’s climate neutrality claim remains valid even without credits from the lowly rated Chinese wind project.
Soto Niño, the UN Secretariat spokesperson, deferred questions about the Secretariat’s purchases to UNFCCC, which did not respond to questions about specific projects.
WFP did not respond to requests for comment on its purchases.
Buyer beware
Several experts who reviewed the UN’s offset portfolio suggested the UN could have avoided the most common risks associated with carbon credits by selecting project types that are known to offer additionality and don’t come with unintended problems.
More than half the credits reporters managed to trace in the UN’s portfolio, however, were issued by projects categorised as high-risk by the Carbon Offset Guide, indicating that they are among the least likely to have a meaningful climate impact.
The guide, published in 2019 by the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, a Washington DC-based NGO that provides education on greenhouse gas accounting, categorises project types as low, medium, or high-risk, with low-risk project types being the most likely to be additional.
The New Humanitarian and Mongabay found that 51% of the credits in the records the UN provided were issued by high-risk projects, while only 25% were issued by low-risk projects, and another 24% were issued by medium-risk projects.
“The approach of a sensible [organisation] should be to check – what type of credits am I buying?” said Axel Michaelowa, a climate policy researcher at the University of Zurich and senior founding partner of the Perspectives Climate Group consulting firm.
Michaelowa also pointed out that the UN purchased small numbers of credits from hundreds of different projects rather than making large purchases from a small number of reputable projects, indicating that it wasn’t being selective.
“This is a clear indication that there is low quality control,” he told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay in a phone interview.
Dufrasne, of Carbon Market Watch, said that in addition to conducting more due diligence before buying credits, the UN should also stop claiming to be climate neutral.
“Where it becomes problematic is if those [offset] purchases create a licence to communicate false statements, such as ‘climate neutrality’,” he told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay.
Romm, the University of Pennsylvania climate researcher, told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay in a phone interview: “It’d be better if the UN simply said: ‘We’re going to try to do what our own expert group said’,” referring to recommendations that offsets should not be used to claim reductions in an organisation’s emissions.
Romm added that low-cost carbon credits, such as those sold by the CDM, tend also to be low-quality. Other climate experts say higher-cost credits are often associated with projects that have better environmental, social, and economic results.
Carbon credits can sell for more than $100 each, with common prices between 2021 and 2023 ranging from $2 to $15.
The UN spent an average of about $1.30 on each of the credits it disclosed to reporters. WFP bought more than half its credits – 500,000 – for just 12 euro cents each, while UNFCCC bought nearly 60,000 for 12 US dollar cents each, according to records provided.
“Anything that’s in the $3 to $4 price range… you get what you pay for. The reason [CDM credits] are cheap is because they’re not genuine,” Romm said.
As scrutiny of offsetting practices intensifies, some organisations have stopped buying carbon credits altogether and are instead investing in reducing their emissions directly.
Last year, the UK-based airline EasyJet announced it would not buy offset credits as part of its latest plan to reduce emissions. The plan instead focuses on using more sustainable fuel and more efficient planes. A 2021 joint investigation by The Guardian and Greenpeace revealed that the airline had been purchasing flawed carbon credits.
Victorine Che Thoener, senior strategic adviser at Greenpeace International, told The New Humanitarian and Mongabay that buying offset credits gives the false impression that governments, organisations, and consumers can buy their way out of the climate crisis without cutting their own emissions.
Theoner added: “Without truly functional climate procedures, the UNFCCC’s legitimacy is at risk – as is a liveable climate for us all.”
(* An earlier version of this article misstated the job title of Marina Maiero at the World Health Organization. This corrected version was published on 13 September 2023.)
Jacob Goldberg reported from Thailand and Léopold Salzenstein reported from France. Sarah Brown reported from Brazil and Shaz Syed from India. Graphics and illustrations by Eva Hilhorst, Marc Fehr, Léopold Salzenstein, and Sofia Kuan. Additional reporting and editing by Paisley Dodds in London.
Originally published by Joseph Romm and Auden Schendler for The Messenger on September 17, 2023
Apple recently released a five-minute ad in which a fictional Mother Nature grills executives on the company’s environmental performance. The ad made Apple look self-critical and diligent.
But, to us, it represents monumental greenwashing. Worse, the company’s dubious carbon-neutral claims may even set the company up for a potential lawsuit. And Apple is not alone: Rival Microsoft — and many other companies — are playing similar games.
Yet, a new report finds that legal cases against corporations for questionable claims quadrupled this year. Among many others, Delta, KLM and the makers of Evian have already been sued.
The Swiss commission regulating ads ruled in June that FIFA misled fans by calling the Qatar World Cup “carbon-neutral” and told it to stop. Then, Nestle abandoned offsets along with its pledges to make products like Perrier and KitKat carbon neutral. This month, Bloomberg reported that Shell “ended the world’s biggest corporate plan to develop carbon offsets.”
Many of the lawsuits revolve around the dubious nature of carbon offsets, in which a company claims reductions of carbon dioxide emissions from an activity in one place to make up for emissions elsewhere. A company that wants to keep polluting might, instead of reducing its own emissions, pay a developing country to reduce emissions. If the buyer purchases enough offsets to cover all its emissions, then it calls itself “net zero” or its products “carbon neutral,” as Apple is doing.
But research on offsets shows “the large majority are not real or are over-credited or both,” as Barbara Haya, director of The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, said earlier this year.
One of many recent media exposés reported that “more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by [the] biggest certifier are worthless.” Most of these deforestation avoidance offsets — used by big companies like Shell, Disney and Gucci — are, according to the report, “phantom credits” and may even “worsen global heating.”
And so the prices of the most popular “nature-based” offsets — planting trees or paying people not to cut down trees — have plummeted 80% in just the past 18 months.
But the courts have made it clear that companies don’t get to decide this, fictional Mother Nature notwithstanding. The leader in setting and verifying credible voluntary targets for thousands of companies is the Science Based Targets Initiative. They require a company seeking to make a net-zero claim to cut its own emissions 90% to 95% — which is hard to do — before it can offset the rest with “high quality carbon removals.” The UN’s High‐Level Expert Group on the Net Zero Emissions Commitments of Non‐State Entities embraced this approach in November.
In its Wednesday press release, Apple wrote that it “has so far reduced total emissions by over 45 percent since 2015.”
Saying that your entire company is far from carbon neutral while claiming a tiny number of your products are carbon neutral is like claiming your pinky is cancer-free when the rest of your body is not.
Apple’s new climate ad sounds like it could have been written by the fossil fuel industry; it fails to mention a single action that might disrupt the fossil fuel economy, such as corporate activism or lobbying. Instead, it focuses on tweaks to its own operations, which can never solve a global problem like climate change.
Double Claiming Offsets
In our view, Microsoft’s greenwashing is very different but equally problematic, as it has been claiming offset credits already claimed by their rightful owner.
The story reads like a crime novel. In May, the Danish government announced it was paying the bioenergy company Orsted to capture 450,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year from two biomass plants and bury it under the Norwegian Sea. Denmark is claiming all those tons and will put them in its national greenhouse gas registry to help meet its official emissions reduction pledge for the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Seems straightforward, right? These were Denmark’s emissions to claim. But Orsted also announced it was selling over half of those very same tons to Microsoft, which is using them offset some of its emissions. It’s like selling a piece of cake to Magnus, and then later to Sally. Sally’s probably going to go hungry.
Remarkably, such an absurd deal is not (yet) banned under the Paris climate agreement. And the voluntary market is entirely unregulated, which means that offsets don’t undergo any verification. It’s the Wild West.
Microsoft’s claim shows the voluntary market is a make-believe exchange that doesn’t sell anything other than PR. Ironically, offsets are turning into the bad kind of PR — the kind that lands you in legal trouble.
No wonder Mother Nature is assaulting humankind with every form of extreme weather imaginable to get us to take real action.
On Sept. 12, PBS, WHYY, and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media will convene community leaders, science communicators, journalists, and leading scientists to discuss the value of storytelling to educate about climate change.
“Climate Solutions and the Role of Media” is a two-part panel to focus on “recasting the climate change narrative,” with a renewed focus on exploring solutions rather than emphasizing crises.
Panelist Michael Mann directs the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. He said journalism should draw connections and illuminate climate change’s widespread impact — for instance, how wildfires in one part of the U.S. worsen air quality in another.
“The last few years as Gen Z has come into their own and started using the power of our voice [which] has allowed us to see this focus shift from alerting the community versus empowering the community,” said Mann in an email.
In a recent interview with PBS Newshour host Amna Nawaz, Mann explained the connection among recent fires, flooding, and severe storms across the U.S.
“Climate change is no longer some subtle, far-off, possible thing. It’s here and now,” Mann said. “It’s impacting us here and now.”
“Explain without over-explaining — break down the lingo succinctly and accurately; and relate it to what is going on with the general public,” he added. “People will relate to issues better if they can see a way that it impacts them.”
Bill Gardner, vice president of programming at PBS, agreed.
“It’s about stories, and about community. It’s about people who are doing things and being active,” Gardner told WHYY News. “With a lot of scientific concepts, it can seem so abstract and so big.”
PBS focuses on stories that “give entry points for people who want to participate in the world,” and show how changes in the climate affect communities around them.
Gardner put it like this:
“You talk about the world that people inhabit, that they live in. And you put it in the context of understanding … the things that we’re experiencing.”
He hopes to equip people with tools to navigate the changing world.
Mann and Gardner agree that the evening will convey a clear message: The better audiences understand why climate change and the narratives surrounding science matter, the better equipped community members are to enact change — whether through lifestyle, education, or conversation.
Panelists will include:
Reporter and editor, Susan Phillips of WHYY News Climate Desk
“Climate Solutions and the Role of Media” takes place Tuesday, Sept. 12 at 5 p.m. at the Harold Prince Theater on the University of Pennsylvania Campus. The event is free and offers open seating, however registration is required to attend. The talk will not be livestreamed, but a recording will be made available on YouTube shortly after.
Gresham’s Law says that bad money drives out good. If you have two coins with a face value of $1, you will spend the bad one that contains 25 cents’ worth of metal and stash away the good one that contains $1 worth of metal.
Something like Gresham’s Law is at work in the carbon offset market, which was set up to fight climate change. Bad carbon credits are driving out good carbon credits. And that’s a big problem for the effort to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up the planet and wreaking havoc from the Arctic to the Antarctic.
An Aug. 16 report for clients of the British bank Barclays put a positive spin on the problem but contained some worrisome information.
The Barclays report focused on the voluntary carbon market. That’s the one that companies such as Microsoft and Salesforce are using to help reach their goals of net-zero carbon emissions. If they can’t reduce their own emissions all the way to zero, they can go into the market and buy credits from someone in, say, Brazil who has earned them by planting trees to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The voluntary carbon market can be a valuable mechanism for directing investment to developing nations that need help in the fight against climate change.
“The market will get big because we need it to get big,” Austin Whitman, the chief executive of the nonprofit Climate Neutral, told me. “We will not hit net zero without large and well-functioning carbon markets.”
Here’s the Gresham’s Law problem, though: According to the Barclays report, the price of carbon credits has fallen to around $2 per metric ton of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere, down from around $9 early last year.
That’s not because the cost of reducing emissions is really just $2 a ton. It’s because buyers don’t trust the quality of the credits. They worry that the sellers of credits aren’t doing what they promise. For example, a seller might claim credit for stopping a forest from being cut down when there was no plan to cut it down in the first place. This is an old but vexing issue that I wrote about two years ago.
The price of carbon credits is much higher in the official, intergovernmental markets, which have stricter standards. In the European Union Emissions Trading System, the world’s liquid carbon market, the price of credits is around 94 euros a ton, or more than $100. Those official markets are how countries will comply with the Paris Agreement, a global climate treaty adopted in 2015.
Another problem with the voluntary market is double counting, in which a project that reduces emissions is claimed both by the corporation that paid for it and by the country where the work was done.
The Barclays report said that the voluntary carbon market — with its inconsistency and lack of regulation — is “undermining the Paris Agreement process by casting doubt on the legitimacy of country-level emission reductions since these are also being claimed by corporates in other countries.”
The Barclays authors expressed pessimism that the problem could be fixed through negotiations between the rich countries that need credits and the poor countries that tend to sell them. They described as “relatively unlikely” the possibility that an official market for trading carbon credits could be “operationalized” under Article 6.4 of the Paris Agreement, which covers international trading of credits.
What might happen instead, the Barclays authors wrote, is that the voluntary, unofficial market could expand spectacularly, from $500 million now to $250 billion in 2030 and as much as $1.5 trillion in 2050. That is frankly hard to imagine. To put it in perspective, it would make the market 500 times as big as it is now in just seven years and 3,000 times as big by 2050.
For the Barclays forecast to come true, confidence in the voluntary market would have to be restored. That would require some form of regulation to combat Gresham’s Law, either by governments or by the participants themselves. But why would participants in the voluntary market be able to build a well-functioning international market if governments can’t?
“This is the bombshell that no one understands,” Joseph Romm, a physicist who works on climate-change policy, told me. Romm is a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, where he recently wrote a paper asking whether carbon offsets are “unscalable, unjust and unfixable.”
Rather than growing, as Barclays envisions, the voluntary carbon market ought to be folded into the official market and disappear. There should be a single, unified global market with a single price. That’s the only way to keep Gresham’s Law from doing damage. “It should be reasonably clear that you can’t have two different markets in a world that’s seriously trying to go to zero,” Romm said. “Somebody has to do the official accounting.”
A separate carbon market for voluntary projects made sense in the early years of fighting climate change at the corporate level, when any kind of effort was better than nothing. But it should be a second-best solution now that all countries have ostensibly committed to reducing their carbon emissions, Mark Kenber, the executive director of the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, told me.
“The fact that we are in 2023, some 35 years after international negotiations started, still talking about voluntary action is a sign that we have collectively failed,” Kenber said. He said “the voluntary carbon market is filling a gap that shouldn’t exist” — but added that in the interim, it can play a role in “cutting emissions and channeling finance where it’s needed most.”
Elsewhere: Less Crude for Emergencies
There are about 23 million fewer barrels of crude oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve now than there were in January, when I wrote that the drawdown, which was aimed at holding down prices of gasoline and other refined products, “looks scary.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told CNN in July, “The bottom line is we are going to replenish.” But the replenishment is likely to take years and may never restore the S.P.R. to its 2010 peak, when it held twice as much crude as it does now. Congress, concerned about deficits, will be loath to spend a lot of money buying oil, especially if the price seems high.
On the bright side, a big strategic reserve isn’t as important to the United States as it once was because the United States is less dependent on imports. Also, oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, which are vulnerable to hurricanes, account for a smaller share of production. “Don’t worry about refilling the caverns too quickly,” Julian Lee, an oil strategist for Bloomberg, wrote last month.
Quote of the Day
“At the end of 2022, less than 1 percent of all deposit accounts had balances above the deposit insurance limit of $250,000 but accounted for over 40 percent of banking industry deposits.”
— Martin Gruenberg, chairman of the F.D.I.C., in a speech on Aug. 14, 2023
In hopes to inform people of ways to prevent climate change, former Penn State Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science Michael Mann plans to release a book on Sept. 26 that reviews the lessons that Earth’s history teaches us about the climate crisis.
The book titled “Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from the Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis” was an opportunity for Mann to “get back to the science” of the climate crisis, while informing people about the impacts of future climate change if not addressed.
Mann’s scientific career has centered around researching the history of Earth’s climate changes and what it indicates for the climate system. In his previous books, Mann discussed the politics and policy dimension of the climate crisis. “Our Fragile Moment” allowed him to “connect these things” together.
The book looks back over Earth’s history and provides examples of both the stability and fragility of Earth’s climate.
“In this book, I seek to resolve this paradox, examining how Earth’s climate remains stable when pushed to a point,” Mann said. “[However], it can spin out of control if pushed too hard.”
According to Mann, if individuals “transition rapidly away from the burning of fossil fuels,” they can prevent the warming of our planet.
“If we fail to do so, all bets are off,” Mann said. “The choice is ours.”
With the release of his book just days after the official end of summer, Mann hopes that readers understand it’s not too late to help change the world.
“There is understandable worry over whether it’s too late, whether we’ve crossed some tipping point,” Mann said. “That makes it a particularly critical moment for the lessons from this book — that it’s not too late, it’s still up to us. There is urgency, but there is agency, too.”
According to Mann, this summer will be “unlike any summer [that has been] yet witnessed,” with recent weather events.
“There is a pervasive sense of doom that I witnessed among many who are witnessing the onslaught of dangerous and deadly extreme weather events,” Mann said.
Administrative Coordinator for the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media Heather Kostick said Mann’s upcoming book will “provide context and hope” to the world.
“We are inundated with doomism messaging around climate change,” Kostick said. “I hope that folks read this book and see that it’s not too late, and we can use Earth’s past history to inform our future.”
Editorial Director at PublicAffairs Colleen Lawrie said she hopes that Mann will continue to “be the voice of reason in a world full of noise” on the issue of climate change.
“Among his many talents, Dr. Mann is one of the best science communicators out there,” Lawrie said. “His book zooms through paleoclimatic history, and Dr. Mann uses vivid stories of events past to shed light on our current climate crisis.”
Despite the opinions of others, Mann said following his heart and trusting his instincts has gotten him to where he is today.
“I chose to lean in and embrace the opportunity to inform the public discourse over the greatest challenge we arguably face, and I’ve never looked back,” Mann said. “I consider myself privileged to be in a position to inform this critical conversation.”
COLUMBUS, Ohio – One of the largest distributors of fossil fuel-based natural gas to Ohio homes wants to give customers the option to “offset” the carbon emitted by the gas they buy.
Under the proposal to state regulators, Dominion Energy, which serves 1.2 million customers throughout eastern and northeastern Ohio via its subsidiary East Ohio Gas Company, would task its gas suppliers with planting trees or investing in renewables to balance out the carbon emissions of gas used by customers. Instead of reducing carbon emissions by shifting to nuclear, wind or solar energy generation, the company says it can obtain “net zero” by compensating elsewhere for the planetary heat-trapping effect of the gas it delivers.
Dominion, not the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, would verify that “Decarbon Ohio” gas suppliers acquired enough offsets through “carbon registries” that certify them, according to a company spokeswoman.
“By providing customers a supply option that offsets the carbon emissions related to their consumption of natural gas, the implementation of the program would allow [Dominion], its customers, and suppliers to make meaningful contributions to both the reduction of emissions and the support of sustainable investments,” the company said in a legal filing.
Dominion pitched the idea as a voluntary means for customers to reduce their carbon footprints. Customers would be able to choose from a range of suppliers, including a set that would take steps to offset their carbon emissions and those that would not. So far, Dominion has said it won’t charge customers extra for choosing suppliers that offset carbon emissions, but a final decision will rest with PUCO.
But economists and environmentalists say there’s widespread evidence that the purported offsets don’t reduce emissions in any meaningful way, and they don’t trust a major fossil fuel company to help mitigate climate change.
Joe Romm, of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, published a 50-page whitepaper arguing that carbon credits are “unscalable, unjust and unfixable.” In an interview, he said even the “Decarbon Ohio” marketing points to “magical thinking” – investing in renewable energy somewhere else doesn’t remove any carbon from the atmosphere in Ohio. He said the proposal is just a form of “greenwashing” – feigning environmental interest for public-relations purposes without accomplishing much of substance.
“The program that has been proposed by Dominion is basically one to deceive the public. I don’t know how else to put it,” he said. “The serious people about climate change are pretty rapidly moving away from using carbon offsets for making claims about carbon neutrality.”
The PUCO will rule on Dominion’s request in the coming months. But other Ohio players are in the ballpark. NiSource, via its subsidiary Columbia Gas, also recently asked the PUCO to launch an offset program, but it later dropped the idea. Duke Energy allows customers to purchase a “GoGreen rider,” charging them $1 per month for the purchase of “renewable energy certificates”— buying renewable generation elsewhere to “match” the fossil fuel-derived energy used at home.
“When you purchase RECs, you can feel good knowing that you are supporting renewable generation,” Duke says on its site.
The companies’ interest marks a shifting position from the industry in response to what Dominion called a “growing interest among customers … to reduce the carbon footprint associated with their natural gas service.”
Upon combustion, natural gas emits less carbon into the atmosphere than coal or oil. However, its main component is methane, which produces a much stronger greenhouse gas effect than carbon. Gas also tends to leak from pipelines or blown out wells, which cuts into its relative emission reductions. The scientific arm of the United Nations has grown increasingly adamant that global governments must get away from fossil fuels and decarbonize their grids in earnest to temper an increasingly warming planet.
Regardless, Dominion and others have championed messaging around concepts like the use of “sustainable” natural gas. Ohio now legally recognizes natural gas as “green energy.”
Some purported carbon offsets are overvalued, according to Rob Kelter, an attorney with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.
“The best carbon offset program is to reduce people’s usage of natural gas. Period,” he said. “I’m very skeptical of the true value of carbon offset programs, and I worry they delay the necessary hard decisions and actions that need to take place for us to really reduce carbon emissions.”
Continuing to build more fossil fuel infrastructure with a 30- to 50-year return on investment instead of pivoting toward renewable sources, he said, will likely leave customers paying for vestigial pipelines and gas plants when an inevitable shift to renewables sets in.
A Sierra Club spokesman declined to address Dominion’s proposal specifically. However, the organization has urged federal regulators to crack down on “deceptive claims and omissions” companies use to claim their climate friendliness, often predicated on flimsy purported offsets.
Attorneys with the Sierra Club wrote to the Federal Trade Commission that most offsets don’t actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. Rather, they claim to avoid future emissions or to temporarily store the element in “carbon sinks” like forests or soils.
“Temporary carbon storage is a problem because unless there is a credible commitment to maintain those carbon stocks for centuries to millennia, there is a significant risk of a re-release of carbon to the atmosphere, negating many of the climate benefits these offsets claim,” the organization wrote.
Romm, from Penn, said claims of carbon neutrality that rely on carbon offsets are positioning companies for a flood of false advertising lawsuits. Investigations in media outlets like The Guardian and ProPublica have raised questions of fraudulent claims from the companies selling the credits, as have researchers who examined the question.
Some companies have began to distance themselves from the offsets. The CEO of United Airlines said that the “majority of them are fraud” and the offsets often claim credit for trees that would have been planted or cut down anyways. Major brands like Nestle and Gucci have stepped away from claims of carbon neutrality. Swiss regulators found in June that FIFA, the international governing body for soccer, made false and misleading statements about reduced environmental impact of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Reuters reports. And Delta was recently hit with a class action lawsuit in May in connection with its claim of being the “first carbon-neutral airline,” per the Associated Press.
Noted climate researcher Joe Romm has published a paper debunking carbon offsets as basically useless and holding back emissions reductions.
Joseph Romm is a leading expert on climate solutions and clean energy who has spent much of his career working to communicate with the public about these topics. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and has authored countless articles and 10 books on the topics of climate change, clean energy, and communications.
In 2009, TIME named him a “Hero of the Environment” and “the Web’s most influential climate change blogger.” He served as the chief science advisor for the Emmy-award-winning series “Years of Living Dangerously.” His book Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know was called “the best single source primer on the state of climate change” by New York Magazine.
In July of this year, Joe Romm joined the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media as a senior research fellow. Michael E. Mann, the director of PCSSM, welcomed him with this statement:
“We welcome Dr. Romm to Penn and we look forward to working with him in advancing the study and practice of effective climate communication. I have personally known Joe for nearly two decades, since the time I was an early career climate scientist who found myself caught in the crosshairs of the climate change denial machine.
“Joe was one of the first scientists to confront industry-funded disinformation and taught us valuable lessons about science communication, lessons which I’ve taken to heart as I have focused more of my own time and effort on climate communication. We are now at a major crossroads when it comes to urgency of climate action, and I couldn’t be more delighted that Joe is joining us at Penn at this critical juncture in the climate battle.”
One of the first things Joe Romm did after he joined PCSSM was publish a resarch paper with this rather provocative title: “Carbon offsets are unscalable, unjust, and unfixable — and a threat to the Paris Agreement.” In it, Romm doesn’t pull any punches. He basically calls the whole idea of carbon offsets a scam designed to let polluters pretend to be doing something about their climate killing activities while actually doing nothing at all.
Joseph Romm is a leading expert on climate solutions and clean energy who has spent much of his career working to communicate with the public about these topics. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and has authored countless articles and 10 books on the topics of climate change, clean energy, and communications.
In 2009, TIME named him a “Hero of the Environment” and “the Web’s most influential climate change blogger.” He served as the chief science advisor for the Emmy-award-winning series “Years of Living Dangerously.” His book Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know was called “the best single source primer on the state of climate change” by New York Magazine.
In July of this year, Joe Romm joined the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media as a senior research fellow. Michael E. Mann, the director of PCSSM, welcomed him with this statement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=P6ag3b1WCYc ” data-image-caption=”Joe Romm via YouTube
“We welcome Dr. Romm to Penn and we look forward to working with him in advancing the study and practice of effective climate communication. I have personally known Joe for nearly two decades, since the time I was an early career climate scientist who found myself caught in the crosshairs of the climate change denial machine.
“Joe was one of the first scientists to confront industry-funded disinformation and taught us valuable lessons about science communication, lessons which I’ve taken to heart as I have focused more of my own time and effort on climate communication. We are now at a major crossroads when it comes to urgency of climate action, and I couldn’t be more delighted that Joe is joining us at Penn at this critical juncture in the climate battle.”
One of the first things Joe Romm did after he joined PCSSM was publish a resarch paper with this rather provocative title: “Carbon offsets are unscalable, unjust, and unfixable — and a threat to the Paris Agreement.” In it, Romm doesn’t pull any punches. He basically calls the whole idea of carbon offsets a scam designed to let polluters pretend to be doing something about their climate killing activities while actually doing nothing at all.
In other words, carbon offsets are just another in a never-ending chain of things designed to let fossil fuel companies keep adding unsustainable levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and other climate-killing emissions to the atmosphere while hiding behind a smokescreen of promises and perceived good intentions. Romm’s paper is 50 pages long, so you will be happy to know we will only hit the highlights here.
What Are Carbon Offsets?
Romm writes that the U.S. Government Accountability Office describes carbon offsets as “reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from an activity in one place to compensate for emissions elsewhere.” In a typical transaction, a developed country or company — instead of reducing its own heat-trapping CO2 emissions — pays a developing country to reduce its emissions by an equivalent amount instead. If the buyer purchases enough offsets to cover all of its emissions, then it calls itself “carbon neutral” or “net zero.”
Typical projects are deploying clean energy, planting new trees, and paying people not to cut down trees. But research on offsets shows “the large majority are not real or are over-credited or both,” Dr. Barbara Haya, director of The Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, said earlier this year. These problems pervade every major offset program.
Consider the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the world’s largest carbon offsets program, which was launched in 2006. Over 50% of CDM offsets came from China and nearly 70% from China and India. Studies have found the vast majority of those credits were not genuine. Either the projects would have happened anyway (without the offset money) or they were credited for far more reductions than actually occurred, or both.
Also, since 2006, China has built so many coal plants, its yearly CO2 emissions increased by nearly as much as the U.S. emits today. India’s emissions doubled. So, not only was there little actual clean development, but those offsets were sold to developed countries, letting them generate as much as 6 billion tons of CO2 more than they would have otherwise. Too often, offsets cause pollution and discourage genuine CO2 reductions, Romm writes.
A Growing Consensus
Romm notes there is a growing consensus that companies should not be using any offsets they buy from developing countries to make claims about emissions reductions or net-zero emissions. The Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which works with thousands of companies, said in 2021, “Net-zero targets are mostly greenwash” that focus on “offsets instead of reducing emissions.” This growing consensus is very visible in the price history since June 2022 of Nature-Based Global Emissions Offsets (NGEOs), such as forest conservation or restoration projects.
The UN is considering changes to the carbon offsets program, but Romm believes they will make it easier for developed countries to reach their Paris climate commitments while making it harder for developing countries to do so. Dr. Haya said recently, “I don’t think it’s fair and I don’t think it’s what we should be doing.” This burden shifting is also not popular with most developing countries. Therefore, we are unlikely to see it happen at scale until those carbon offsets are much more expensive than they are today.
In 2023, the World Bank modeled authorized offsets and found they may well exceed $100 a ton. A high price is especially likely because there are far fewer “negative emissions” — tons of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) — available than were expected. “Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution,” argues a 2023 Nature article. If we don’t “drastically reduce emissions first,” CDR “will be next to useless.”
Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is unlikely to generate significant negative emissions by 2050, and scaling it up may well increase global warming for decades. At a June 2023 Direct Air Capture Summit hosted by industry leader Climeworks, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher “told the crowd his company could see its prices remain as high as $300 [per ton] by 2050.”
For most countries, achieving net-zero emissions in the coming decades will involve fewer purchases of carbon removal and more pursuit of domestic emissions reductions, which will likely become more expensive over time. Selling off the easiest emission reductions cheaply now may be a counter-productive policy for any country.
The Takeaway
There’s more — lots more — in the Joe Romm paper. But what little of it we have seen so far is enough to show that carbon offsets are a shell game — a system constructed to allow the biggest polluters to just keep on doing what they have always done, which is dump millions upon millions of tons of pollutants into the atmosphere with no regard for the consequences.
Carbon offsets are an attempt to fix the basic problem, which is that the world operates on an economic system that imposes little or no costs for polluting the environment. It reminds me of a quote by Mother Jones, one of the fiercest proponents of “workness,” who said, “I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.”
The fossil fuel industry is shining us all on with scheme after scheme to allow it to continue extracting coal, oil, and methane from the Earth and selling it for another few decades or centuries because they have a perceived duty to maximize shareholder value. One might think the law would impose an additional duty — to not destroy the environment that sustains us — but they don’t teach such “woke” nonsense in business school.
Until they do, humanity is likely doomed to disappear from the face of the Earth within the next century or so. It is startling to realize how willing we are to be bamboozled by charlatans and crooks.
The staggering amount of land that would be required defies practical reality. And new research makes the idea even less serious.
Our team at Climate Interactive together with the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative calculated the CO2 emissions the world must avoid or sequester by 2050 to meet the temperature goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, aimed at preventing catastrophic climate impacts. We used our simulator En-ROADS, a global dynamic model designed to compare different climate solutions.
We found that planting 1 trillion trees, under optimistic conditions, would remove only 6% of the needed CO2 reduction. And that would require a wildly unrealistic amount of land, over 2 billion acres, which is to say over 2 billion football fields—greater than the total land area of the contiguous United States.
Instead, we should prioritize protecting existing forests, eliminating the burning of fossil fuels and rapidly reducing the emission of other heat-trapping greenhouse gases like methane.
Why is there such a limited impact from planting 1 trillion trees? First, we don’t actually plant trees; we plant seedlings — and it takes a long time for them to grow big enough to remove much CO2 from the atmosphere.
So this policy wouldn’t help much until the 2040s or 2050s, while we urgently need results in this decade and the 2030s. Some might argue that we could just plant faster-growing trees. But fast-growing tree species, such as Loblolly pines, remove less CO2 every year than slower-growing trees.
And where would we even plant 1 trillion trees? There’s the rub.
We won’t plant them on good cropland because that will be needed to feed 10 billion people by mid-century. A landmark 2022 study in Nature Food found global cropland expansion has been accelerating, adding 250 million acres since 2000. Another study found “the vast majority of models estimate expansion of agricultural land by 2050, including several by more than half a billion hectares” (over a billion acres).
We also shouldn’t plant them in permanently snow-covered areas in Alaska, Canada, the Nordic countries and Russia. The dark forests would absorb more heat than the white snow did and thus “have a warming effect that exceeds the cooling effect of reducing [greenhouse gases],” as the National Academy of Sciences explained in 2019.
And “it would be a mistake to plant trees in natural grassland and savanna ecosystems,” as César Terrer, the lead author of a 2021 Nature study, explained. “Our results suggest these grassy ecosystems with very few trees are also important for storing carbon in soil.”
We shouldn’t plant them in wildfire-prone areas, which are expanding due to climate change.
For all these reasons, the United States will not be planting anything close to 1 trillion trees, nor will the world. In fact, a November report found the world’s nations had already committed to over 1.5 billion acres of reforestation as part of their Paris Agreement climate pledges. So, most other countries already have their own unrealistic plans for using their own land to plant trees to meet their climate targets.
Planting trees is good for many reasons, but it cannot make a significant dent in the climate problem. For McCarthy to propose planting 1 trillion trees is both magical thinking and a distraction from the real work.
The real work regarding land is to end deforestation and protect existing forests, which are already major removers of CO2, and to stop burning up our forests in wood-based bioenergy plants. And, even more importantly, we must sharply reduce the burning of coal, oil and gas, while cutting methane emissions. That will take real effort, but at least it won’t require magic.
Andrew P. Jones is the executive director of Climate Interactive, which runs climate strategy workshops for global decision-makers.
Michael E. Mann has been a central figure in the battle for the environment since the “hockey stick” graph made him a target for climate change deniers 25 years ago. Now on Penn’s faculty and heading the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, he’s fending off a new generation of “inactivists” comprised of climate change deflectors on the right and doomists on the left to get out the message that it’s still within our power to save the planet.
As about 30 undergraduates sleepily settled into their seats one morning this past February for an introductory level course called Global Climate Change, Michael E. Mann filled the time by asking them what they’d been reading.
Someone mentioned seeing an Associated Press article reporting on a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science predicting that, within the next decade or so, the planet will warm beyond the 2015 Paris Agreement’s call to limit the increase in average global temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. To elude that grim fate, according to the United Nations, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 at the latest and decline 43 percent by 2030. The student pointed out that Mann was quoted in the article as a calming voice to offset the gloomy prognosis.
“Yeah, that spin was actually something I disagreed with,” Mann told the class. “The laws of physics may be immutable, but the laws of policy are not. This is not a cliff—it’s a highway. We may miss the 1.5 exit, but we can still take the 1.6 exit. Our only obstacle is political—a self-defeating prophecy.”
“I feel like over the last couple of years, doomism has become the predominant rhetoric around the issue of climate,” the student complained, frustration quickening her voice. “It’s such a copout.”
“It might be gratuitous of me to say, but I very much concur with you,” Mann responded dryly.
It’s been 25 years since Mann—the star climate scientist who joined Penn’s faculty last fall as a Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science after 17 years at Penn State University—made his first entrance into the great climate change debate after coauthoring a paper that introduced the immediately iconic and enduringly controversial “hockey stick” graph.
So dubbed for its mostly flat and then steeply ascending shape, the graph neatly distilled complex and disparate data to illustrate, simply and clearly, the dramatic uptick in world temperatures during the late 20th century. From the start, climate deniers questioned Mann and his colleagues’ methods and conclusions, and things grew ever nastier over the years.
Mann emerged from the flurry of attacks intent on pursuing his science but also determined to fight climate change deniers in the public arena. Looking back, he offers a summary of the decades-long brawl: “I was subject to attacks on my ideas, my integrity, my livelihood, and my life,” he says. “I do feel privileged, though, to be in the position of being an important voice in the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced. None of that would have happened if not for the hockey stick.”
Drew Shindell, an earth sciences professor at Duke University who’s known Mann for 20 years, observes that “rather than retreating into a shell and not engaging, Mike has used those attacks and made them part of his very compelling personal narrative.”
There’s been no shortage of accolades to balance the attacks. Along with fistfuls of awards and citations from a variety of professional associations, Mann has been rated as among the 50 leading visionaries in science and technology by Scientific American, and his work was cited as contributing to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore. Just months ago, he was named the 2023 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.
Though it subjected him to decades of attacks by climate deniers, the “hockey stick” graph also helped make Mann “an important voice in the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced.” Photo by Lisa Godfrey
In the classroom, he’s a nonintimidating, genial presence, offering patient tutelage and spot-on metaphors delivered with Wallace Shawn-like intonations and quizzical sidelong glances. His commitment as an educator is one of Mann’s “best qualities,” says his friend Bill Nye (aka “the Science Guy”). “He’s someone who is playing at the very top of his game, and here he is teaching classes to undergraduates. He wants them to get excited about their ability to do something about the climate crisis.”
That’s certainly the case for Jasper MacLean C’23, an environmental science major who, though he found the class itself “a bit elementary,” adds that he “really wanted to take it because I like exploring the policy and philosophy behind educating people in these issues. Most professors don’t go into that.”
Mann’s current scientific research includes studies on factors affecting the beginning and end of ice ages, which have implications for predicting the behavior of melting ice sheets in the present day, and on the connections between climate change and extreme weather. With a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication, he also has a platform to combat the forces of denial and spread accurate information on climate change as director of the new Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.
“Michael Mann is not only a distinguished scientist but a highly visible and accessible communicator of science,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. “He is very interested in the ways in which media shape our understanding of climate science.”
Mann has been a source for the APPC’s factcheck.org for decades, Jamieson adds. “As Penn was trying to recruit him, I met with Michael and told him we were standing ready to do anything that we could to help him join us.” Next year, she notes, the annual meeting of the Society of Environmental Journalists will be held at Penn “as one of the first major activities to tell the world that Michael Mann is here.” In the meantime, the Center has presented several interdisciplinary panels, including an introduction to the business and investment approach known as ESG (for Environmental, Social, and Governance) that takes nonfinancial factors into account, cosponsored with the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the Wharton Climate Center. Last fall, Jamieson moderated a panel discussion at Perry World House with Mann and Malcolm Turnbull, who advocated for sustainable energy and climate action policies as prime minister of Australia [“Gazetteer,” Nov|Dec 2022].
The Center “will host events to bring together policy and business leaders, researchers, students, and faculty,” Mann says. “We want to propel Penn to the very forefront of the climate conversation today. It’s exciting for me to be here at this time.”
Mann’s latest book, The New Climate War (PublicAffairs, 2021), gives a good sense of how he views the current state of battle. In it, he takes on the fossil fuel industry, internet trolls, and bad actors in government and media, who he says conspire to deflect attention from the problem—since outright denial of the physical evidence of climate change is no longer credible.
This “new climate war” adopts the playbook of deflection campaigns mounted by the tobacco industry and the gun lobby. An early example of the genre in the environmental area was the “crying Indian” anti-littering public service announcement of 1971, released under the auspices of an organization called Keep America Beautiful. Beyond the deception of using a buckskin-adorned Italian American actor with a talent for tearing up as the star, a consortium of beverage companies was behind the ads, with the goal of stopping the passage of bottle bills that would be costly and burdensome for them to implement and manage. The idea in all cases: we as individuals need to step up and take responsibility, absolving corporations from taking a role.
Similarly, climate “inactivists,” as Mann calls them, tout personal actions—recycle, become a vegetarian, stop flying—as the primary solution to the climate crisis. “Though these actions are worth taking,” Mann writes, “a fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold [companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP] accountable.”
Emphasis on the individual’s responsibility is also handy in attempts to divide and conquer, such as by pitting climate scientists and environmentalist factions against each other over how much their “personal carbon footprint” (a concept that BP was an early promoter of in the mid-2000s, Mann says) undermines their authority as advocates for policy change. In one passage, he details a cooked-up controversy in which he was accused of indirectly attacking the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg (for actions like sailing rather than flying across the Atlantic for a UN climate summit)—during an interview where he criticized inactivists for deflecting attention from systemic solutions to personal action. He also recounts stories of other climate scientists, as well as celebrity advocates like Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore, who have been charged with hypocrisy for their excessive consumption of, say, meat, energy, or jet fuel.
Climate change deniers turned deflectors have also worked to thwart economic measures like cap and trade, a carbon tax, or carbon credits designed to level the playing field between fossil fuels and renewables—aided at times, to Mann’s regret, by climate advocates on the left; fan fears that climate action will destroy jobs; and paint renewable energy projects as unreliable because the sun isn’t always shining or the wind blowing.
Another technique involves advocating for “non-solution solutions” like large-scale carbon capture and sequestration or using geoengineering, say, to control the climate—a favorite of former Microsoft CEO, philanthropist, and tech visionary Bill Gates, who Mann notes has spent millions supporting research on the concept. For various reasons, Mann argues, all of these technologies will be ineffective and/or dangerous—and are unnecessary. A truly viable path forward “involves a combination of energy efficiency, electrification, and decarbonization of the grid through an array of complementary renewable energy sources,” he writes. “The problem is that fossil fuel interests lose out in that scenario, and so they have used their immense wealth and influence to … deflect attention from these real climate solutions, promoting in their place ostensible alternatives.”
Mann frequently uses the phrase “urgency and agency” to characterize his own perspective, emphasizing both the enormous stakes involved in climate change and the conviction that acting quickly and forcefully to implement policies to combat it can have an impact. A significant chunk of the book addresses commentators—many of them ostensible allies—who dismiss the second part of that mantra. In a chapter titled “The Truth Is Bad Enough,” he takes on climate activists who display “a distinct appetite for all-out doomism—portraying climate change not just as a threat that requires urgent response, but as an essentially lost cause, a hopeless fight.”
Citing both fringe outlets and high-profile examples like the novelist Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker article, “What If We Stopped Pretending? The Climate Apocalypse Is Coming. To Prepare for It, We Need to Admit We Can’t Prevent It,” and journalist David Wallace-Wells’ New York Magazine article and later book The Uninhabitable Earth, Mann argues that their claims about runaway temperatures and cascading effects leading to a hellish future landscape have little basis in climate science (which has actually done a pretty good job of predicting impacts so far) and also reinforce more general doubt and distrust of that science—playing into the hands of climate deflectors/deniers. Such “climate doom porn” may now be “a greater threat to climate action than outright denial,” he suggests.
As an alternative, Mann offers his own four-point battle plan for the new climate war: Disregard the doomsayers. (“The climate crisis is very real. But it is not unsolvable. And it’s not too late to act,” he writes. “Every ounce of carbon we don’t burn makes things better.”) Take to heart the example of young people like real-life activist Thunberg and the fictional Sophia, protagonist of a children’s book Mann coauthored, The Tantrum That Saved the World. (“The children speak with a moral clarity that is undeniable to all but the most jaded and cynical. It is a game-changer.”) Don’t allow climate denialists to pose as good faith “skeptics” and focus on educating “those who are reachable, teachable, and movable.” Finally, while acknowledging the value of individual action, concentrate on systemic changes aimed toward decarbonizing the energy sector. On this last point, the coronavirus offered a telling lesson “about the limits of behavior change alone,” when widespread lockdowns only cut global emissions by 4 percent.
Mann grew up in Amherst, where his father was a math professor at the University of Massachusetts. He took to math and science early—he remembers stopping by Penn to pay homage to ENIAC while on a family visit to Philadelphia—but mostly as the path of least resistance, rather than out of a passion for the subjects.
That changed when he encountered the work of charismatic scientist, author, and television personality Carl Sagan, whose PBS program Cosmos premiered when he was a high school freshman. “Sagan showed me the magic of scientific inquiry,” he writes, and “made me realize it was possible to spend a lifetime satisfying one’s scientific curiosity by posing and answering fundamental existential questions.” Later in the 1980s, Sagan became an ardent opponent of the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative and was subjected to the kind of personal harassment and professional discrediting that Mann himself would later contend with. In another common thread, Sagan’s controversial nuclear winter simulations “were based on early-generation global climatemodels.”
By that time, Mann had made his way from Amherst to college at UC-Berkeley, where he double majored in applied math and physics. He then moved on to Yale for master’s degrees in physics and a PhD in geology and geophysics. In his second year in New Haven, he found himself idly thumbing through a course catalog looking for a change of pace. He noticed a class offered by Barry Saltzman, a giant in the field of weather and climate. For a physics and math guy like Mann, though, what was really intriguing was the fact that Saltzman’s work during the early 1960s had become the acknowledged progenitor to chaos theory as developed by fellow meteorologist Edward Lorenz, which seeks to define the patterns underlying seemingly random events. Math and physics and climate—it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Mann became interested in studying the natural variability of climate and wound up with Saltzman as his PhD advisor.
An encounter at a wine tasting between Mann’s father and Raymond S. Bradley, head of the department of geosciences at UMass Amherst, proved fortuitous. When Lawrence Mann told the geography professor of his son’s studies at Yale, Bradley invited the younger Mann to come back home to Amherst for his postdoc. “The funny thing,” recalls Mann, “is that Ray’s son was my 10th grade lab partner in biology!”
Mann was soon ensconced in an upstairs apartment in his parents’ house and ready to work with Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, a University of Arizona specialist in interpreting proxy climate indicators (as opposed to actual temperature recordings) like tree rings, ice cores, and coral. Their resulting paper, with Mann as lead author, analyzed climate data back to the year 1400 and was published in Nature on Earth Day 1998, a year that would turn out to be the warmest one since modern climate records had begun 150 years earlier. The study was picked up by major dailies, newsweeklies, magazines like Rolling Stone, and national broadcasts.
The attention led to another pleasant surprise for Mann—his selection as a lead author for the then-forthcoming IPCC Third Assessment Report (to be published in 2001). In early 1999, Mann and colleagues also released a follow-up to the 1998 paper that incorporated data going back to 1000.
Gavin A. Schmidt, now director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, remembers those days well. “I was at McGill University working in a group that was focused on climate and this was a new thing at the time,” he says. “Climate was studied by atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, paleontologists, and Michael and I came from physics and math, so our trajectories kind of reflected that. We were trying to work out how we could make a mark.”
Mann’s work, beyond its importance to climate science, was “sociologically interesting” because of those silos. While analyses of paleoclimate had been going on since before the ice age cycles were discovered in the 1960s, “the way of working in that field was for many individual people to focus on many individual sites going back in time,” Schmidt says. “There wasn’t a culture of synthesis. Mike is coming from outside of the field, and he’s coming in with this notion of, ‘What can I do, using my math and my stats?’ and then Ray is like, ‘Why don’t we put it all together?’ And that’s the genesis of the hockey stick,” he recalls.
“Initially it was like, this is great …. We would hang out and Mike was basking in the attention, being invited to give keynotes—it was a big step up for him professionally,” Schmidt adds. “Then we started to see the bad faith attacks because it became so high profile.” While the specifics varied, they all boiled down to Mann “getting blamed for the fact that it’s obviously warming up over the 20th century, and to a lot of people who would rather that that not be true—including the fossil fuel industry—he became the fall guy.”
Attempts to undermine the hockey stick began in the late 1990s and conservative media outlets and politicians continued raising questions for years. In 2006, the National Academy of Sciences even felt compelled to put out a statement that the conclusion of Mann and his colleagues “has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.”
In 2009, emails written by Mann and other climate scientists were hacked in an effort to discredit them, an occurrence inevitably dubbed Climategate. Later that year, factcheck.org presented an analysis of the claims. “The 1,000-plus e-mails sometimes illustrate the hairier side of scientific research,” it read in part. “Criticisms of climate change are sometimes dismissed as ‘fraud’ or ‘pure crap’ …. Other messages, like a 2007 e-mail from Michael Mann of Penn State University, show indignation at being the target of skeptics’ ire …. Claims that the e-mails are evidence of fraud or deceit, however, misrepresent what they actually say.”
Nevertheless, Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, launched a two-year investigation of Mann, looking for evidence of fraud during his time as a researcher and professor at the University of Virginia. And in 2012, a blog post on the website of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (whose self-described mission is to “reform America’s unaccountable regulatory state”) compared Mann to disgraced Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky, “except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data”—a comment that was repeated by outlets including the National Review and Wall Street Journal.
“It really never stopped,” Mann says.
“I would have been very happy staying in the background doing the science that I love doing,” he adds. “But they engaged me, to attack and vilify and intimidate me in a cynical effort to discredit my work. I’ve personally seen the enemy close up for decades—I see how they operate and the tactics they use. It took a toll, for sure.”
The resulting atmosphere of controversy, Mann believes, made funding agencies shy away from supporting him. “Personally, I received the nastiest emails you can imagine; there were death threats aimed at me and my family. I received an envelope containing white powder.”
Eventually Mann and his peers learned how to fight back.
“We ended up going to workshops on journalism and media,” Schmidt says. “We learned how to tell a story, how to get down to what’s important for people to understand, how to combat bad information. How to get the scientist back into the discussions.”
One of the people Mann turned to was Susan Joy Hassol, a science writer and consultant who directs Climate Communication, a nonprofit that helps climate scientists learn how to get their message across to the general public simply and without jargon. Mann is listed as a science advisor to the organization.
“Mike has learned how to get his wonderful sense of humor through in his writing and to use metaphor and turns of phrase like the ‘urgency and agency,’ which came naturally out of his brain and is just perfect,” Hassol says. Some 20 years after they first met, the two still regularly team up to write op-eds around teachable moments like extreme weather events—see, for example, “The Heat Dome? Yeah, It’s Climate Change,” in the New York Times in June 2021, and “Enjoy the Weather. Worry About the Climate” in the Hill, last February.
Along with Bradley, Schmidt, and a few others, Mann also launched realclimate.org in 2004, when the notion of direct peer-to-peer communication via blogging was new. “The trigger was the movie The Day After Tomorrow,” Schmidt says with a laugh. Premised on a sudden climate shift that triggers a new ice age, the film had, he quips, the “distinction of being the best movie that has a paleoclimatologist as a hero and the worst movie that has a paleoclimatologist as a hero.” Still, with headlines like “Some new CMIP6 MSU comparisons,” the site is a pretty wonky and insidery effort.
“We in the scientific community produce things like giant IPCC assessments,” says Shindell, who has also contributed to the blog. “But basically the story remains the same—you have to stop using fossil fuels or you’re going to wreck the planet—which is what it was decades ago.
“Communicating the societal impacts of climate change and of different mitigation options, I think, makes the discussion more palatable,” he adds. “If you can say, these many fewer people will die from heat waves, the number of children’s asthma hospitalizations will decrease by this much, this many more people will be employed in new energy industries …”
When it comes to putting the crisis into a relatable context, Mann for one “leaves no stone unturned,” Hassol says.
Each of Mann’s books have tackled the warming problem in a different way. Published in 2008, Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, written with Penn State Professor of Geosciences Lee R. Kump, is a graphics-intense layperson’s introduction to the nearly two decades worth of lengthy IPCC reports. Four years later, Mann’s second book, the memoirish TheHockey Stick and the Climate Wars, delved into the science behind that graph, the resulting controversy, and Climategate. Four years after that, Madhouse Effect, created with coauthor, Tom Toles, a Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post, offered a one-two punch of clever language and witty drawings to debunk climate deniers.
Mann contributed scientific background and explanatory text suitable for young children for The Tantrum That Saved the World, by writer and illustrator Megan Herbert, in which the teenaged Sophia one day finds a parade of displaced animal, insect, and then human refugees arriving at her doorstep and vows to help them by marching, with protest sign aloft, to City Hall, where she is joined by her young friends. The book ends with Sophia standing on the steps of the White House. Originally self-published by Herbert in 2017, Tantrum came out a year before the then-15-year-old Thunberg began organizing her “Fridays for Future” campaign, leading thousands of students to skip school each week to protest for more action against climate change.
Following last year’s New Climate War will be Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis, scheduled for publication this fall. “Climate variability has at times created new niches that humans or their ancestors could potentially exploit, and challenges that at times have spurred innovation,” reads the book’s advance notice.
In considering the opportunities and challenges of climate swerves—and the potential disaster when things get too far off course—it’s impossible not to think of COVID-19 and the crisis the world has recently endured. “The novel pandemic, in terms of forcing animals out of their natural habitats and into contact with human populations was, like climate change, a consequence of our destruction of our earth,” Mann observes. “It also drove home that anti-science is deadly: the defiance of public health messaging, refusal to get vaccinated and to wear masks, that became part of a tribal identity. It was right out of a dystopian nightmare.
“My childhood hero, Carl Sagan, basically presages all of this,” he continues. “I quote a passage from him in The New Climate War, and I tweet it often. It’s from The Demon-Haunted World.” The segment reads:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when … we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness … . The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media … lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
And yet Mann remains optimistic. “It’s never been in my constitution to throw in the towel,” he says. “My battles now are not so much about defending my science, or even climate science, but battling the forces of inaction. Fortunately, it’s a battle in which there are many allies—a massive movement that I wouldn’t have envisioned years ago.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=P6ag3b1WCYc ” data-image-caption=”Joe Romm via YouTube
