Worth pausing to look at the shape of this thread.
The article cited:
→ Guardian / Die Zeit / SourceMaterial investigation, peer-reviewed in Science (West et al. 2023): ~94% of Verra's rainforest credits show no real climate benefit
→ Probst et al. 2024, Nature Communications, covering ~1B tonnes — one fifth of every credit ever issued: <16% represent real reductions across the whole voluntary carbon market
→ Carbon Market Watch / Oeko-Institut, Nov 2025: no proven link between offset purchases and corporate climate ambition
→ Brazilian Federal Police, Nov 2025: 31 people charged in Operation Greenwashing — projects sold to Nestlé, Boeing, Spotify, PwC
→ CarbonPlan's 14-protocol soil carbon review: BCarbon flagged for no additionality test, no sampling-depth specification, no non-CO₂ GHG accounting
→ BCarbon's own Sept 2025 stakeholder update: announcing they are now building an Additionality Framework, five years in, and applying to ICROA — a different, less rigorous body than ICVCM
Across the replies, in order:
- "Why do you care, this has nothing to do with you"
- "It's only the start"
- "Don't write off the whole space, look at crypto"
- "Shocking you'd post this"
- "The planet will survive without your nonsense"
- "Hedera is getting involved, that's the fix"
- "Your project will fail in 5 years"
- "Rice University, do your research"
- "Bashing the ecosystem isn't a good look"
- Invitation to discuss → counter-offer of written engagement → "don't have time to convince sceptics"
One person engaged the methodology directly with a real argument about removal vs avoidance credits. I responded in detail.That exchange is the only substantive engagement in the thread.
The rest is the pattern.
Methodology on one side. Vibes, deflection, personal attacks, and credentialism on the other.
The Probst figure hasn't been touched.
The additionality gap hasn't been touched.
The validation report's gaps on N₂O, calcareous-soil measurement, and lifecycle emissions haven't been touched.
If anyone has a counter to those — I'm here for it.
The written invitation stays open.
Otherwise the thread speaks for itself.
I've never bought a carbon credit. After looking at the data, I don't think I ever will.
The Guardian / Die Zeit / SourceMaterial investigation — now backed by peer-reviewed research in Science — found ~94% of Verra's rainforest credits had no real climate benefit.
Deforestation baselines overstated by ~400% on average. Over a billion credits issued.
The industry response hasn't been to fix the methodologies. It's been to tokenise them.
Projects like
@dovuofficial on
@hedera are positioning themselves as the "trust layer" for carbon — minting soil carbon and REDD credits on-chain via Hedera Guardian, with a flagship $1.1B / 2.5M-acre US farmland deal claiming 41M tonnes CO₂.
Worth asking some questions before celebrating:
— A blockchain records what it's told. If the underlying baseline is wrong, the credit is wrong, and now the wrong number is immutable. Does on-chain verification actually solve the measurement problem, or just the recordkeeping one?
— Soil carbon is among the most contested categories in the entire VCM. Reversibility, measurement uncertainty, additionality — all unresolved. Tokenisation doesn't change the science.
— Hedera's "public ledger" is governed by a permissioned council. For a registry pitched as the balance sheet of the planet, that's a governance question worth answering.
I wrote up the broader picture — the scandals, the incentives, where this is heading — here, in the quoted article.
Open to being wrong. Show me the audited tonnes.