A nonprofit has promised to save wildlife. He then made millions claiming that he could cut down trees

Clegern said the program’s sponsorships avoid the problems identified by CarbonPlan.

California’s offsets are seen as an additional carbon reduction because the floor serves as a “conservative retardation,” Clegern said. Without this, he explained, many landowners could have reached even lower levels without compensation.

Clegern added that the agency’s rules have been approved as a result of a lengthy discussion process and have been accepted by the courts. The California Court of Appeals found that the Air Resources Commission was sufficient to use a standardized approach to assess whether the projects were additional.

But the court did not rule on the effectiveness of the rule, and it was “quite a difference from the agency’s ruling,” said Alice Kaswan, a law professor at San Francisco University School of Law, in an email.

California law requires state limits and trade regulations to ensure that emission reductions are “real, sustainable, quantifiable, verifiable” and “in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise occur.”

“If there is new scientific information that suggests serious questions about the integrity of compensation, then there is no doubt that CARB has an ongoing obligation to consider that information and review its protocols accordingly,” Kaswan said. “The duty of the agency is to enforce the law and the law requires additionality.”

Recipe

In early spring, scientist Lautzenheiser Audubon brought the journalist into the forest protected by the compensation project. The trees here were mainly tall white pines, mixed with oaks, maples and oaks. Lautzenheiser is usually the only human in this part of the forest, where he spends hours searching for rare plants or exploring salamander streams.

Nonprofit planning documents acknowledge that forests enrolled in the California program were protected long before compensations were created: “The majority of the project area has been designated as a high conservation value forest with long-term intentional nature management. Values ​​for conserving resources.”