Delta and many others have loaded up on credits that originated under the CDM and were then repackaged through Verra and Gold Standard.
Christy Goldsmith Romero, commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which said in June it is looking at the quality of carbon credits.United Airlines’ Chief Executive Scott Kirby is among critics of voluntary carbon offsets, charging that they allow buyers to tout their emissions reductions while failing to take effective action to limit climate change.
The program set off building sprees of solar, wind and hydro power projects launched by giant companies and funded by governments. By the end of 2011, the U.N. program had nearly 4,000 registered projects, nearly half of which were wind farms or hydroelectric facilities mostly in China and India, according to an analysis of U.N. data from the Copenhagen Climate Center, a climate-advisory institution.
The wind farms are located in Gansu Province in North Central China, which rejected a third of the available wind power in 2017, according to a state agency, the same year some of the credits bought by Spotify were generated, according to Gold Standard’s carbon credit registry. By 2020, Gansu was still rejecting 6.4% of the wind energy.CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/REUTERS
In 2011, Spain’s Acciona applied to the U.N.’s CDM program to create and issue carbon credits from a string of wind farms it was building in India. Construction on the Tuppadahalli wind farm began in 2010 and the next year it was ready to generate electricity, according to Acciona news releases. In 2012, the project was approved by the U.N.
In 2020, Delta announced plans to spend $1 billion on sustainability efforts over the next decade to become the “first carbon neutral airline globally” on investments including more fuel-efficient fleets, technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and carbon credits, according to a news release, company comment and a Journal analysis of registry data.
But it has made us all poorer…so there’s that.