By Chris Lang This post is the first in an occasional REDD-Monitor series collecting together some thoughts around the coronavirus crisis. Forests, deforestation and the climate crisis may seem distant problems when we’re all facing the threat of a deadly virus. But when the coronavirus crisis is back under control at some point in the…
Category: USA
How Microsoft avoids answering questions about its “carbon negative” partnership with Pachama: “We’d like to politely decline to respond on this one”
By Chris Lang In January 2020, Microsoft announced a new climate initiative. The company’s press release was headlined, “Microsoft will be carbon negative by 2030”. It sounds great. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s climate initiative is greenwash, based on carbon removal, (a technology that Microsoft admits, “does not exist today”), and tree planting on a massive scale (which…
Interview with Diego Saez-Gil, CEO of Pachama about his company’s work for Microsoft: “We can’t disclose details of the partnership”
By Chris Lang In January 2020, Microsoft announced that it “will be carbon negative by 2030”. The news was repeated widely and largely uncritically, although Greenpeace’s Elizabeth Jardim pointed out to BBC News that, “a gaping hole remains unaddressed: Microsoft’s expanding efforts to help fossil fuel companies drill more oil and gas with machine-learning and…
For an economics that takes the climate science seriously
By Chris Lang In 2018, the economist William Nordhaus won the Nobel Prize in Economics. The prize was awarded to Nordhaus for “for integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis.”
California approves the Tropical Forest Standard. Good news for the fossil fuel industry. Bad news for the climate crisis
On 19 September 2019, the California Air Resources Board voted 7-4 to approve the Tropical Forest Standard. CARB is determined to convince us that this is not an approval of REDD offsets in California’s cap-and-trade scheme. In a presentation about the Tropical Forest Standard CARB staff point out that, “Endorsement of the Standard Does Not…