Let’s Own This! Is a non-profit that helps people, families, households and friends work towards carbon positivity.
Hi everybody, I’m telling you in advance I’ll be calling out businesses and governments that are lying to you when it comes to generating the carbon credits you pay for. They know who they are, and they are lying in order to convince consumers they are model citizens. They want you, the consumer, to be happier and more confident doing business with them, even if it is undeserved. Shame on them.
This article is a gentle warning, but future posts will deliver more abrupt, more specific, and more pointed challenges to the stories you are being told. This all may heat up, but I believe it necessary for us to actually make progress towards a more stable climate.
I generally don’t like throwing shade, but my long professional career has convinced me that someone has to do it, whether it’s a whistleblower inside an organization, or legislators grilling the executive branch, or shareholder rights groups, or journalists. We all know such voices are maligned and scorned, crying in the wilderness without an interested audience, sometimes forever. I find myself embarking on this path right now.
There are usually victims of this kind of bad corporate and governmental behavior, and in this case, the victims are every single human being, including homeowners on beaches, vacationers in the mountains, and even Ukrainian refugees. Everyone. We are buying snake oil (Check out the song “Pirelli’s Elixir” from Sweeney Todd). We are paying for things we aren’t getting, both at the cash level and at the existential level. Our peace of mind about doing something good is often unwarranted.
LOT’s big idea is that regular people need to take more direct responsibility for their environmental behaviors, and be rewarded with access to information that helps them do so. We can’t assume businesses, institutions, and governments are going to do it for us. It’s not going to happen if we don’t get directly involved. But how?
One key idea is that information needs to be simple and clear enough for anyone, not just the brain surgeons among us, to understand. Armed with such information and understanding, we can more intelligently take responsibility, and make better decisions how to behave.
My commitment to you is that I will develop accessible explanations about carbon credits and put them forward in this blog, an e-book, a webinar, and even a course. Stay tuned. My ask of YOU is that you consider it your responsibility to understand enough about carbon consumption and credits to recognize snake oil when you smell it.
I also want to disclose another reason for throwing shade. LOT is planning to create a scaled project to remove carbon dioxide from the environment, as are many other organizations, among them profit and non-profit oriented. I’ll tell you more about the specific project in the near future.
Such projects cost money, and LOT, a not for profit, will need to rely on healthy transparent, carbon credit markets to cover the expense of building the system. LOT will present in great detail its plan to anyone who wants to see it, including the reasons it will reduce carbon in the environment, and all the carbon unfortunately generated to execute the project. LOT will even undergo regular audits during the life of the project. Doing it this way costs time, money, and yes, even some carbon dioxide generation, with the clear understanding that much more carbon dioxide is removed from the environment than created. This method is more expensive than just telling you I did it, but the upside is your absolute confidence you are buying what you think you are.
In short, LOT, and every other organization out there, doing it the “right” way, needs the economic reward for telling the truth and delivering an actual measurable product. In a competitive market where all the best ideas come forward and are funded, carbon credit producers like LOT must be allowed to eventually earn a “normal” profit. False products costing much less, if anything, to produce must be identified and rooted out, or else the market will clear on fictitious, rather than factual, carbon credits. Organizations doing it right and telling you the truth will be crowded out.
And you will be left with snake oil to treat your hair loss.
That’s why I will be calling bad actors out, directly and without a second thought. Consider yourself warned.
