"Green Finance", "Carbon Offsets" Just More Ways To Greenwash, Create Market Plays While Doing Nothing For Climate
Rolando Zumba, a gentle fifty-nine-year-old, wept through an Associated Press interview as he described the displacement of his people and their traditional lands to make way for a giant carbon offset project. His own ability to hunt disappeared when rangers in Peru’s Cordillera Azul National Park—a spectacular 13,500-kilometre sweep of Amazon rainforest, mountains, and waterfalls—confiscated his hunting rifles. The act ended self-sufficiency for his Kichwa tribe on its ancestral land, ensuring poverty and hunger for his people.
In a December 2022 exposé, the news agency reported that this project was flawed from the beginning. The carbon credit program was set up in 2008 to “offset” the carbon footprint of Shell and TotalEnergies, which purchased blocks of the park, allowing them to claim more than 28 million “credits,” meaning they were theoretically offsetting that much CO2. The project brought in so much money, it covered around 90 percent of the operating expenses of the park and was supposed to be used for forest protection and reforestation. But the AP exposé found that not only did the companies exaggerate the credits earned, tree cover loss in the park also dramatically increased due to increased deforestation.
The market approach to nature is now deeply entrenched in many governments and international institutions, and trading in nature’s “assets” is a huge business. Most people around the world know little or nothing about this fast-moving development. But its reach is astounding.The financialization of nature is modelled on the same economic logic that promotes investments that attempt to profit from the fluctuations in the market value of assets. Nature-based finance zeroes in on climate change and other environmental crises. Every firestorm, hurricane, and flood presents an opportunity for experts in risk forecasting to advise on the cleanup and recovery technologies that will be needed. And governments give large tax breaks and other incentives to the corporations, banks, and asset management companies that use “green” funds to underwrite such businesses. Green finance is part of the doctrine of neoliberal capitalism, which holds that the market can resolve almost all social, economic, and political problems, including the climate crisis, better than governments.
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Big energy, mining, and logging companies were excited about what would have been the largest attack on public US lands and water in modern American history. Initially, in its summer 2025 “big, beautiful” bill, the Donald Trump administration proposed to lease 2 million acres of public lands—an area larger than Texas and California combined—to the private sector. “Expanding oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters through mandated lease sales would turn parks, coasts, wildlife refuges, and sacred landscapes into drilling and mining zones,” said the non-partisan policy institute Center for American Progress. Strong opposition from many quarters, including the outdoor recreation industry, caused senate Republicans to remove this provision from the bill. But Americans who care about their public parks and wildlife are on notice that the government might try again at some future time.
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https://thewalrus.ca/green-finance-promises-to-save-the-planet-its-doing-the-opposite/
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