OPINION: Voluntary carbon, the Washington Post, and 'Gell-Mann amnesia'

Quantum Commodity Intelligence – Steve Zwick is an independent journalist with previous experience at Time Magazine, Ecosystem Marketplace and other outlets. Steve also spent nearly two years in US-based carbon registry Verra's communications teams.

The usually reliable Washington Post recently published a piece so riddled with false premises, innuendo, and factual inaccuracies that I thought for a moment they'd outsourced their fact-checking to the Guardian.

Entitled "How 'carbon cowboys' are cashing in on protected Amazon forest," the piece opens with one false premise, segues into a handful of others, and then proceeds to present a persistent and well-known problem in the land sector of Brazil as a deep, dark secret unique to the carbon markets.

Frustratingly – and as always seems to be the case – the piece dances around some legitimate and important but boring issues before dropping them to pursue red herrings and strawmen.

Absurd claims

As a result, it only serves to expand rather than bridge the dangerous disconnect between public discourse and legitimate debate, ultimately hobbling efforts to meet the climate challenge.

Specifically, the piece opens with the absurd claim that much of the Amazon is "safeguarded behind a green shield of publicly protected land", then segues into the equally absurd statement that carbon credits are a "lucrative commodity" that has "become one of the world's most important tools in the fight against climate change".

Later, it presents the problem of tangled titles in Brazil as something hidden and unique to carbon markets instead of what it is – namely, a persistent and well-documented challenge that I've covered intermittently over the past 20 years – most recently in April, for both Bionic Planet and Quantum Commodity Intelligence – and plenty of others have covered in far more detail.

To the first point: the sad fact is there is no "green shield" because deforestation in Brazil is more rampant on public than private lands, although it fluctuates by administration. What's more, this is hardly a secret. In fact, it's a core to the challenge we face today. Anyone who claims Brazil's public lands are a "green shield" hasn't done their homework. What's next? Theranos is magic? Facebook values your privacy? Guinness is good for you?

As to the "lucrative commodity," the fact is that many – and perhaps most – project developers were bleeding red ink for most of the past 15 years. With a few high-profile exceptions, they only started making a profit when the world belatedly awoke to the enormity of the climate challenge in 2018.

The world awoke so late because mainstream outlets failed to cover the challenge until we were far into overshoot – as Columbia Journalism Review editor Kyle Pope acknowledged in 2020.

Prices overstated

The piece cites some of my own work from Ecosystem Marketplace, where we found that $11 billion has gone into the VCM over the past 25 years, but it fails to put that figure into perspective. $11 billion is roughly what one newspaper, the Washington Post, earned in the same period, and they still managed to run at a loss – despite facing nowhere near the kinds of challenges that carbon projects do.

It also seriously overstates the prices that developers received over the past 25 years, and it ignores research that repeatedly shows that REDD+ becomes more effective as prices rise, for obvious reasons: as prices rise, the operational costs become a lower portion of the total, and more money can flow to activities on the ground.

Then there's the fuzzy claim that carbon credits have "become one of the world's most important tools in the fight against climate change."

This is a germ of truth because the World Bank estimates that a global carbon market can double the impact per dollar spent, but we're not there yet.

In discussing the current importance of the voluntary market (VCM), the piece inadvertently reiterates a point that environmental economist Mark Kenber repeatedly makes: namely, that the VCM only occupies such an outsized role in the global effort to meet the climate challenge because everything else failed. When he and others initiated the process of developing the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) in 2005, they envisioned it as one small, focussed, and transitional piece in a global mosaic of interlocking solutions.

Within that mosaic, the VCM was created on a shoestring to achieve two objectives: First, to encourage emission reductions earlier and beyond what's required by law, on the premise that governments would eventually get their acts together and the VCM could provide a bit of accelerant. Second, to pilot new methodologies that would be improved over time as more data and lessons emerged.

It achieved both objectives, but – tragically – the rest of the mosaic failed to materialize. Then, the VCM's policy of pushing its imperfections into view, combined with its status as one of the few efforts achieving anything beyond talk, made it a target of outliers, ideologues, and opportunists looking to torpedo markets or make names for themselves.

Proponents don't like to discuss this because they fear it makes them look like conspiracy theorists or leaves them open to the charge of being knee-jerk defensive.

There is a difference between being defensive and providing clarity. It's called context.

There's also a difference between conspiracy theory and real collusion. It's called evidence.

Flawed report

The impetus for this WaPo piece, for example, was a seriously flawed report called "Neocolonialism in the Amazon: REDD Projects in Portel, Brazil," which was published by a shady outfit called the World Rainforest Movement (WRM).

The WRM is funded by equally shady outfits, including the murky German group Olin gGmbH, which has funded shoddy reporting in Die Zeit and elsewhere, as I will show in an upcoming episode of my Bionic Planet podcast.

For now, look up the WRM's 2022 annual report, which states that "opposing REDD, and supporting communities in their struggles against the imposition of REDD projects in their territories are among WRM's key activities."

REDD projects are vulnerable to this kind of attack, which relies on cherry-picking and other tropes of science denial, for two reasons: first, because they are, by their nature, operating in difficult terrain and taking on challenges where others have failed. They don't promise paradise on earth, but they're picked apart for failing to achieve it.

Second, because the VCM itself is built on the principle of constant improvement, which means it's always re-evaluating itself and pushing its flaws into the open. Legitimate participants use this process to improve it, but illegitimate participants use it to undermine trust, just as the Merchants of Doubt did to climate science itself in the 1990s and 2000s.

People who couldn't be bothered to think of the climate challenge until five years ago are quick to compare interventions developed 15 years ago to those available today – or, more often, to imagined states of perfection rather than viable alternatives. They also fail to acknowledge the challenges of evaluating new approaches and updating old ones in ways that support realistic, smooth progress.

The Guardian inexplicably insists that the larger mosaic of solutions will magically appear if it can only eliminate the VCM. WaPo seems to be falling into the same magical thinking – oblivious to the fact that the larger mosaic failed to emerge in part because mainstream media failed to explain it.

Now it's doing the same with solutions – as I warned in 2022 it would.

I say this as someone who believes that mainstream media, like the VCM, is a necessary institution that faces difficult headwinds (as evidenced by WaPo's own financial losses).

I should also point out that I worked quite happily in mainstream media until 2005, and I only left (with a $40,000 per year lower salary) because none of the majors were willing to devote resources to climate coverage.

I'm also a paid subscriber to the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as several magazines, and no, I'm not going to cancel my subscription.

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

At the same time, a friend recently told me about the "Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect," which was coined by the late sci-fi writer Michael Chrichton, who described it thus:

"You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues.

Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories. Paper's full of them.

"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

It's odd to be quoting Chrichton in a piece on climate, given his own denial of the evidence on climate change, but he's got a point – maybe one aligned with the more famous Dunning-Krueger effect.

To me, the real problem is that most of the instant experts pontificating on the climate challenge only dropped into it a few years ago, and the world lacks a critical mass of editors and news consumers who understand the basics well enough to know bunk from legitimate debate.

A piece like this gets in my craw because tangled titles are a huge problem – as, again, I and others have repeatedly made clear – but it's nowhere near as simplistic as the WaPo makes it seem.

I've personally investigated projects that have seen their titles change due to alterations in government databases or policy. I've also seen negotiated settlements to these disputes that won't show up on maps.

For that reason, WaPo's methodology of simply overlaying projects onto government maps is about as flawed as the Guardian's silly contention that rudimentary academic exercises using untested models and incomplete data will give you a meaningful evaluation of project baselines.

Having said that, the piece does get something right:

Independent auditing groups (Validation and Verification Bodies, VVBs) have failed to understand the nature of titles in Brazil because so many are based in Europe and China (something I alluded to on the Smarter Markets podcast a few weeks back).

The piece, however, implies this is a new revelation rather than what it is: an old problem that standard-setting body Verra, which oversees the Verified Carbon Standard, began to address in 2018, but that mainstream media ignored.

Just because you ignore something doesn't mean it's hidden.

The problems with this piece go on and on, but it also raises a few points that could be serious if they turn out to be true, and that's what's so frustrating.

Given the reporter's failure to get even basic premises right and to insist on presenting an old, grey, intractable problem as a new, straightforward, and simplistic story with heroes and villains, I'm inclined to disbelieve those parts I don't know anything about.

This article first appeared on Steve Zwick's LinkedIn page on July 26