Carbon Credit Scam

The OSU College of Forestry appears to have been the victim of a carbon credit scam. This page lays out the evidence we have collected so far, and it describes a Public Records request we are using to verify the existence and scope of this apparent scam.

Basically, we suspect the College of Forestry was taken in by an Advance Fee Scheme. The FBI's Advance Fee Schemes page says:

"An advance fee scheme occurs when the victim pays money to someone in anticipation of receiving something of greater value—such as a loan, contract, investment, or gift—and then receives little or nothing in return.

"The variety of advance fee schemes is limited only by the imagination of the con artists who offer them. They may involve the sale of products or services, the offering of investments, lottery winnings, “found money,” or many other “opportunities.”

In this case, the College paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance to consultants and staff in the expectation of qualifying the Elliott State Forest to sell Carbon Offset Credits through the California Air Resources Board's Compliance Offset Program:

"The Compliance Offsets Program is an important cost-containment element within the broader Cap-and-Trade Program. The California Air Resources Board issues ARB Offset Credits to qualifying projects that reduce or sequester greenhouse gases (GHG) pursuant to six Board-approved Compliance Offset Protocols."

We feel this was a scam because, as John Charles, Jr. discusses in more detail below, the Elliott State Forest doesn't qualify, according to the California ARB rules, for issuing ARB Offset Credits. Everyone involved in this carbon credit analysis either knew or should have known about the mismatch between the ARB rules and the Elliott's actual circumstances, so we feel they had a moral responsibility to stop promoting carbon credits as a likely source of significant ongoing revenue.

If we understand this scam correctly, it was also troublesome because it was based on taking money from Oregon's Common School Fund; that is, from our State's schoolchildren.

Not all-advance fee scams are illegal: Some just charge victims unreasonably high fees for future products or services of questionable value, and the victims get mislead into willingly going along with the arrangement. Also, the perpetrators might honestly believe they are providing useful services, even though outside observers would conclude otherwise.

Background Ideas

"Why carbon credits for forest preservation may be worse than nothing."

This section provides an overview of why we are concerned about the moral basis of selling carbon credits for forestry.

About ProPublica

The prestigious ProPublica organization has "Journalism in the Public Interest" as its motto. ProPublica has a team of more than 100 dedicated investigative journalists and has received three Pulitzer Prizes for the quality of its work.

ProPublica's Mission Statement is:

To expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.

That is precisely what we are trying to accomplish with the KeepTheChildrensForest.Org website.

ProPublica's article about forest carbon credits

The image at the top of this page comes from a ProPublica article titled, "An Even More Inconvenient Truth: Why Carbon Credits for Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing", by Lisa Song, May 22, 2019.

This entire article is worth reading, but here are relevant portions:

The appetite is global. For the airline industry and industrialized nations in the Paris climate accord, offsets could be a cheap alternative to actually reducing fossil fuel use.

But the desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven’t — and won’t — deliver the climate benefit they promise. ...

In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last.

Everyone agrees forests are a vital buffer against climate change. The question is whether their preservation should be linked to offsets that allow others to keep polluting. For this to work, ecologists told me “rock solid” accounting is necessary.

The math starts with an estimated baseline, a guess at what deforestation would look like without offsets. The more deforestation you anticipate, the more credits you generate, the more money you stand to make. It’s easy to game the system by nudging the numbers toward the bleakest alternative reality. ...

The uncertainties of carbon accounting, which get magnified by large-scale programs, are so nebulous, scientists don’t even know how much they don’t know.

Stanley Young, a spokesman for the [California Air Resources] board, told me California’s standard has built-in safeguards to avoid repeating mistakes. “We’re as aware as you are of how it has not worked in the past,” he said.

The standard requires programs to exceed protections in existing policies and to show a drastic reduction in deforestation. It requires that trees stay standing for 100 years.