‘Big Con Game’: Corporations Sink Hundreds Of Millions Into Carbon Credit System On Already Protected Land

[Excellent piece here by Owen Klinsky at the Daily Caller revealing carbon credit schemes as the outright scams they truly are.]

A large number of carbon credit projects are claiming to preserve land that is already being protected by Brazilian conservation efforts, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Over the past two decades, so-called “carbon cowboys,” people who set up carbon credit initiatives for financial gain, have launched land preservation projects across the Amazon rainforest, generating carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars and building a thinly regulated market valued at nearly $11 billion worldwide, according to The Washington Post. The Brazilian government’s anti-deforestation policies already safeguarded more than 78,000 square miles of land used for preservation projects before they were claimed for carbon credits, and 29 of the 35 internationally certified projects in the Amazon overlap with public lands, meaning a large percentage of carbon credits overlap with already existent conservation measures.