Why Not Carbon Credits?

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The carbon credit system is fundamentally:

Speculative

Fragmented 

Price driven

Short term

Volatile

Hedged

Laced with Uncertain and Phantom Value

In carbon credits the majority of money appears to flow to source work, with 60-80% going towards specific projects and project developers. Significant percentages are spent on the system itself including intermediaries and brokers. 

Significant credit funds go towards developers simply managing a project. 

Unfortunately, an inner-system loop has formed within carbon credits with institutional investment for compliance going to institutionally-owned projects. It’s a self-validation extraction engine. 

Major polluters own forest projects and buy their own credits at market price. They write off the expense, claim carbon neutrality, and circulate money internally. 

In addition, the entire “carbon credit” ecosystem has developed a secondary market. This entire economy is built upon speculation and trading potential ownership of something that has already happened in the land. This is Financial Profiteering from holding a certificate that essentially says someone else did something good, got paid less for it, but by owning the credit you get…. More? 

Nothing from the secondary market where credits can change hands many times benefits the work in the ground. Currently, we have carbon credits being traded 20 years after their creation. 

Long after the sequestering, many missed meals later for a farmer, that same action paid speculative investors up to hundreds of times what the farmer received. 

Prices affecting both primary and secondary markets of traditional carbon credits are influenced by standard supply/demand metrics that often come down to corporate compliance efforts.  

The system rewards holding and trading certificates *more* than actually doing the work. It’s a perverse incentive where the planet loses, finance wins and speculation is vastly more important than action. 

Explore these investigations, reports, and analyses to understand why traditional carbon credits are failing to deliver real environmental impact—and how the Carbon Mining Exchange is fundamentally different:

- **[The Guardian: Revealed – more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest certifier are worthless](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-analysis)**

- **[Bloomberg: The Carbon Offset Market Could Be Worth $100 Billion by 2030—but Is It Working?](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-06-19/how-the-carbon-offset-market-got-too-big-for-its-own-good)**

- **[ProPublica: An Even More Inconvenient Truth—Why Carbon Credits for Forests Are Failing](https://www.propublica.org/article/carbon-offsets-climate-change-forests)**

- **[MIT Technology Review: The Loopholes in Carbon Offsets](https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/21/1077755/the-loophole-in-carbon-offsets/)**

- **[Yale E360: The Uncertain Value of Forest Carbon Offsets](https://e360.yale.edu/features/carbon-offsets-greenhouse-gas-emissions-climate-change)**

- **[World Economic Forum: Secondary market of carbon credits—risks and rewards](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/01/secondary-market-carbon-credits-explained/)**

- **[Reuters: Explainer—How carbon credit markets work](https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/explainer-how-carbon-credit-markets-work-2023-10-03/)**

- **[OECD: Integrity and transparency in carbon markets](https://www.oecd.org/environment/cc/carbon-market-integrity-report-2023.htm)**

- **[Financial Times: Carbon credits—market built on ‘flimsy foundations’](https://www.ft.com/content/c437e2f2-2f9c-48a7-81cb-b62f6c6d12bb)**