Any one country would have difficulty accepting even the generous Swiss offsets for very long.
The ninth day of COP26 seemed to appear in split screen. On the one side was a front page story from The Washington Post, compiled over the past year by a team of investigative reporters led by Pulitzer laureates Chris Mooney and Juliet Eilperin. On the other side were knock-down-drag-out battles in the Blue Zone over creation of a carbon trading ecosystem under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
The 6000-word Post article is a likely candidate for more Pulitzers — it is one of the biggest bombshells dropped by a major newspaper since the Pentagon Papers or Watergate. It describes how scores of countries have found ways to game the voluntary pledge system by not reducing their actual emissions while claiming large annual reductions. Some examples:
- Malaysia subtracted over 243 million tons of carbon dioxide from its 2016 inventory by claiming its trees absorb carbon four times faster than similar forests in neighboring Indonesia.
- Current U.N. rules allow China, Russia and the United States each to subtract more than half a billion tons of annual emissions in the same manner, claiming long-existing forests as offsets.
- From satellite data and spectral analysis, between 57 and 76 million tons of human-caused methane…