Brazil charges 31 people in major carbon credit fraud investigation
news.mongabay.com52 points by PaulHoule 5 hours ago
52 points by PaulHoule 5 hours ago
People have been buying fake carbon credits for a long time. There’s very little incentive to validate the authenticity of the credit/offset. The press release is usually all the value they’re looking for.
I’ve only just now heard of someone getting in trouble for selling them. It’s about time.
OTOH there are lots of people who are interested in selling genuine carbon credits. They are pressuring governments to clean up this market. It's a hard coordination problem, since we don't have a unified world government. (Thankfully).
There should be a world standard or standards for genuine carbon credits. Maybe the UN could create an agency that determines such a standard and verifies that carbon credits meet that standard.
Remember how people used to talk about the environment and stuff, back before AI made everyone turn a hard 180?
What place do carbon credits even have anymore in this economy?
A lot of pro-environment people are reconsidering nuclear these days and were even before things like AI started demanding more electricity because it doesn't involve burning more hydrocarbons.
It’s laden with fraud everywhere, sadly. US regulators like SEC have no interest in auditing, from what I’ve seen. “Spice must flow” attitude.
Don't are they all? It would be almost more newsworthy if somebody could present a bit bigger serious carbon credit thing.
I get very frustrated by "carbon credits". This is an example of criminal fraud. But the whole idea is begging for fraud. It is a fraudulent concept from start to finish
Reminds me of the Catholic's concept of "indulgences". Sin the sins, pay a fee, and go to heaven.
In this case the "sins", and the sinners, are burning the world for profit
Will they line these people up in the street and kill them like they did to 100+ people for a low-level drug dealer "sweep"?
Something tells me not. The global push toward hyper-violent policing feels one sided class wise.
Looking at the track record of everyone involved, they'll be tried, convicted, and released to pull the con off again - but perhaps someone from Brazil can chime in and tell us that something's changed in the past year with respect to white collar crime prosecutions.
Did they even really do anything wrong? This whole emission trading thing is a bordeline scam anyway, they just didn't have the right connections so they weren't allowed to profit from this and got caught.
> The police investigation confirmed that two REDD+ project areas were generating carbon credits at the same time they were being used to launder timber taken from other illegally deforested areas.
> Both projects, which cover more than 140,000 hectares (around 350,000 acres), are located in the municipality of Lábrea in the south of Amazonas state. The area has been identified as one of the newest and most aggressive deforestation frontiers in the Brazilian Amazon.
> ...led by Élcio Aparecido Moço and José Luiz Capelasso.
> In 2017, Moço had been sentenced for timber laundering, but in 2019, another court overruled his sentencing. In 2019, he was also indicted for allegedly bribing two public officials.
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It's strange that a conman doesn't seem to be able to change his spots.
Ironically confidence men often get caught when they have too much confidence in themselves.