The New Yorkerのインスタグラム(newyorkermag) - 10月17日 07時00分

South Pole, the world’s largest carbon-offsetting firm, pioneered a model that has been counted among our best hopes of staving off climate catastrophe: diverting funds from polluters in wealthy countries to protect crucial ecosystems in the Global South. “We’re here to save the climate,” its chief executive told Heidi Blake. But the company’s most lucrative project to date, Blake reports, is a dubious scheme to protect a vast forest in Zimbabwe on the banks of Lake Kariba. In partnership with a white Zimbabwean tycoon named Steve Wentzel, South Pole sold millions of Kariba credits to brands like Gucci, Nestlé, L’Oréal, Barclays, Porsche, Volkswagen, and Delta, allowing them to market their goods and services as “carbon neutral.” South Pole took a commission, and Wentzel was to share the remaining profits with the local people. But when South Pole’s head of corporate investments, Dirk Muench, looked into the project, he found that much of the money seemed to have gone astray. Wentzel admitted to Blake that there was no paper trail by design. “I don’t know what you’re going to report on this, and I hope to God it’s not all of it, because I probably will go to jail,” he told her.

When Muench raised his unease over Wentzel’s finances, South Pole played down his concerns; he filed a complaint and left his job. Around this time, South Pole executives learned that the Kariba Project had offloaded millions more credits than could be justified by its forest-protection efforts. Still, in the months since learning of the miscalculation, the company went on to sell three million more credits that it knew to be environmentally hollow. (South Pole insists that all the offsets it oversold will be paid back with credits generated in the future, as dictated by the rules of the industry’s standard-setter.) “They have created this image of being a project developer that protects the climate,” Muench said of the company. “They are nothing of that sort.” At the link in our bio, read Heidi Blake’s reporting on the great cash-for-carbon hustle. Illustration by @jonmcn.

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