In this week’s Gossage Gossip, Mr Gossage explores a peculiar tale regarding carbon offsets at one New Hampshire-based company.
Throughout the developed world, companies are avoiding changing business practices, to reduce their carbon emissions, but instead are looking to pay others to make the reductions for them. Fine – as long as the bought-in carbon offsets are real.
But here is an example of an investment company that operates California Carbon Offset (CCO) projects, saying that some of its projects don’t actually change the way forests are managed, and therefore do little to help the climate.
New Hampshire-based Lyme Timber Co. sells carbon credits on about 89,000 ha, or 15% of its land, and its projects have generated over five million CCOs under California’s WCI-linked cap-and-trade programme, according to data from state regulator ARB.
However, CEO Jim Hourdequin said that when his company began developing a string of offset projects, he was struck by how often they received large volumes of lucrative credits for creating few additional climate benefits. One deal netted Lyme about $20 million for minor changes to a forest in West Virginia.
After purchasing a huge hardwood forest there in 2017, it put together a carbon project on 19,000 ha of forbidding terrain. Some of the land is so rugged and steep, Hourdequin says, the trees can be extracted only by helicopter, which is prohibitively expensive and also decidedly carbon profligate.
Additionally, Lyme’s first carbon project in Tennessee was acquired by selling a restrictive easement to the state of Tennessee on roughly 2,000 ha, preventing the company from harvesting on it. Yet the company still met the criteria under the California forestry offset protocol to generate credits in the programme.
It is now calculated that this official state-run California programme could have erroneously issued nearly 40 million CCOs to forestry projects, enabling developers to utilise gaps in the state’s protocol to inflate emissions reductions attributed to those initiatives. A cautionary tale indeed.