Outdated carbon credits from old wind and solar farms are threatening climate change efforts
French global energy giant Total recently announced it had delivered its first shipment of “carbon neutral liquid natural gas”. Natural gas is, of course, a fossil fuel and so can’t itself be carbon neutral. Instead, emissions from transporting the cargo were partly “offset” by investing in a wind farm in China.
But here’s the problem: that wind farm has been operating since 2011 and has already issued more than 2 million tonnes of these so-called “carbon credits”. A project like this clearly happened nine years ago without the additional funding from selling credits to Total, so it is highly unlikely that the recent purchases resulted in additional removal of carbon from the atmosphere.
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