https://archive.md/r9Wg1
"One evening in November, 2021, a group of men assembled at sundown on the
terrace of the Ruckomechi Camp, a safari resort on the Zambezi River. Since
arriving by private plane, they had gone out lion-spotting, boated down the
river, and landed a giant tiger fish; now they were clinking gin-and-tonics.
Hippos wallowed in the water below.
The party was led by Renat Heuberger, a forty-four-year-old Swiss entrepreneur
with narrow eyes and a cropped copper beard. Heuberger was the chief executive
of South Pole, the world’s largest carbon-offsetting firm, and he had come to
Zimbabwe to fight off an urgent threat to his company.
A decade earlier, South Pole had signed a deal to sell carbon offsets from an
effort to protect a vast swath of forest on the banks of Lake Kariba, upriver
from the camp. The Kariba project, spanning an area ten times the size of New
York City, was among the world’s first “avoided deforestation” programs; by
deterring local people from chopping down trees, it promised to prevent the
release of tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gas. Leading corporations,
including Volkswagen, Gucci, Nestlé, Porsche, and Delta Air Lines, paid South
Pole nearly a hundred million dollars for Kariba credits, allowing them to
market goods or services as “carbon neutral.”
South Pole thus pioneered a model of carbon offsetting that has been counted
among our best hopes for staving off climate catastrophe: a mechanism that
diverts funds from polluters in wealthy countries to protect crucial ecosystems
in the Global South. Heuberger, a kinetic, grandiloquent man, speaks
expansively about his mission. “We’re here to save the climate,” he told me."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
