By Luke Barratt  and  Miranda Green , The Guardian.  Excerpt: Some forest carbon offsets sold by the biggest offsetting company in the US offer little or no benefit to the climate, a satellite analysis has found. Finite Carbon, created in 2009 and bought by British multinational oil and gas giant  BP  in 2020, is responsible for more than a quarter of the US’s total carbon credits, which it says it generates from protecting more than 60 “high credibility, high integrity projects” across 1.6m hectares (4m acres). However, experts at the offsets ratings agency  Renoster  and the non-profit CarbonPlan analyzed three projects accounting for almost half of Finite Carbon’s total credits, with an estimated market value of $334m, according to analysis by market intelligence company  AlliedOffsets . Renoster  found  issues, including trees in a project in the Alaska Panhandle that were probably never in danger of being cut down in an already exte...

By Manuela Andreoni , The New York Times.  Excerpt: The residents of Maracaçumé, an impoverished town on the edge of the Amazon rainforest, are mystified by the company that recently bought the biggest ranch in the region. How can it possibly make money by planting trees, which executives say they’ll never cut down, on pastureland where cattle have been grazing for decades? ...The new company ...is a forest restoration business called Re.green. Its aim, along with a handful of other companies, is to create a whole new industry that can make standing trees, which store planet-warming carbon, more lucrative than the  world’s biggest driver  of deforestation: cattle ranching. ...About a fifth of the great rainforest is already gone. And scientist warn that rising global temperatures could push the entire ecosystem, a trove of biodiversity and a crucial regulator of the world’s climate, to collapse in the coming decades unless deforestation is halted and  an area the siz...

https://www.science.org/content/article/farmers-paid-millions-trap-carbon-soils-will-it-actually-help-planet By Gabriel Popkin, Science.  Excerpt: Lance Unger ...on his farm near the Wabash River in southwestern Indiana ...rather than leaving his fields fallow, he sowed some of them with cover crops of oats and sorghum that grew until the winter cold killed them off. And before [spring] planting ..., Unger drove a machine to shove aside yellowing stalks—last season’s “trash,” as he calls it—rather than tilling the soil and plowing the stalks under. For these efforts, a Boston-based company called Indigo paid Unger $26,232 in late 2021 and an even larger chunk late last year. That’s how much an emerging market values the hundreds of tons of carbon that, in theory at least, Unger yanked out of the atmosphere with his cover crops or left in the soil by not tilling. Slowing climate change isn’t a priority for him, he says, ...[but] the money made it worthwhile. Indigo also made money i...