Carbon credits are an important way to pay for things there's no other way to pay for. I work with Recoolit to prevent refrigerant emissions (more at https://www.recoolit.com/our-work) and there's literally no other way to pay for our work, which can prevent gigatons of CO2e
Personally, I think what you guys are doing is awesome.
The problem I have with carbon credits is that it's just as easy for you to take the refrigerant and just release it into the atmosphere. Or you could just take the carbon credits and no do anything. Or you make some honest effort for half the credits, but then not do anything for half of the other credits you sell.
Who audits you? Who regulates your carbon credits?
Or carbon credits can more like a rent rather than a more permanent solution: "We'll pay the farmers to not burn these acres of the amazon rain forest for another year." What happens when the farmers want 10x more money next year? Are you going to pay them?
I would like a source on how it is useless greenwashing. I work in an investment banks that take investor money and turn them into solar farms that we then sell for massive profits. Sometimes we build entirely new farms, sometimes we buy old ones and renew them, which thanks to advances in tech is also very profitable.
Anyway, paying for these things is a complicated process which among other things like favourable loans involve a bunch of subsidies. Some come from governments, some come from NGOs like carbon credits. I’ll be the first to admit that NGOs are absolute amateurs compared to government support, and it would be much, much, healthier for the climate financing if Facebook were paying a climate tax and not buying carbon credits. But, and this is really important, that’s obviously not as easy as it sounds. It would require an EU and US level corporation of their respective member states to prevent companies from playing each state or country out against each other. That will probably happen eventually, but in the mean time these NGOs help enable progress. It’s not optimal, there’s a lot of issues with some of them cheating or skimming, but it’s still better than doing nothing. World change is this complicated mix of policy, public opinion and money, and while you may get on a box in speakers corner and yell at this, it’s simply how the world operates and will continue to operate for long enough that you’ll have to play into the system if you want to make an impact. If something better comes along at some point, great, but what is the current alternative? For Meta it would likely be to do nothing. Public opinion, corporate image and their internal culture are important to them, but it’s it like they have an issue doing bad things when it’s necessary for them to make money
Now, the reason I ask for a source on carbon credits being usless is genuine. Because as I said, some of these NGO concepts are frauds, and if Meta just bought 7m frauds then I think we would all like to know. If it’s just “like your opinion, man” then that is alright too. I think it’s fair to call a lot of these things for public relations as it would likely be better for the climate if Meta just didn’t build their new datacenter.
I just dig a study done for a joint article by The Guardian and Die Zeit , using different data sources [0], that concludes as much as 90% of carbon credits might be worthless.