RE: LeoThread 2024-12-25 01:23

[ahmadmanga]

The Carbon Credit Bubble

The carbon credit market, a multi-billion dollar industry, is collapsing due to its ineffectiveness in reducing carbon emissions and its exploitation by companies for financial gain, with investors losing hundreds of millions of dollars.

Summarized by Llama 3.3 70B Instruct Model

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[ahmadmanga]

Introduction to Carbon Credits

• 🌎 Companies buy carbon credits to offset their emissions and claim their products are carbon neutral.
• 💸 Two major non-profit organizations, Vera and Gold Standard, dominate the market for these credits and make money from fees paid by projects to register carbon credits.
• 📊 The price of carbon credits varies depending on the number of projects producing credits and companies buying them to make their products carbon neutral.

[ahmadmanga]

The Three Reasons for the Market's Popularity

• 📈 The first reason is to take advantage of new investment trends, such as ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing, which has become popular since 2008.
• 🚫 The second reason is that it slows down regulation, as companies can claim to be carbon neutral with voluntary carbon offsets, which are cheaper than mandatory carbon credits.
• 🤥 The third reason is that the whole scheme never worked in the first place, with a study finding that up to 94% of carbon credits sold never actually removed any carbon from the atmosphere.

[ahmadmanga]

The Collapse of the Market

• 📉 The value of voluntary carbon credits has fallen by over 90% in 18 months, with the price dropping from $19 in January 2022 to $1.77 in September 2023.
• 🚨 A new registry has opened in the Middle East to hand out offset certifications to companies that don't care about actual carbon reduction and just want to put "carbon neutral" stickers on their products.
• 📊 The fourth reason for the market's collapse is that companies have realized there are more effective ways to lobby against regulation, such as learning from the Koch brothers, who have used their money and influence to shape laws in their favor.