Editor’s note: “President Donald Trump has been pushing the U.S. to barrel ahead on deep-sea mining. The country plans to permit mining in international waters under an obscure U.S. law from 1980 called the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act(DSHMRA), which predates the Law of the Sea treaty. Congress wrote the law to serve as an ‘interim legal regime’ — a temporary way to grant mining licenses until the United Nations-affiliated regime took shape.
A main point of contention is that, according to the U.N. treaty and the DSHMRA, the international seabed is designated the ‘common heritage of mankind.’ In other words, the nodules legally belong to all people living on Earth today as well as future generations. The treaty declares that any profits from exploiting that heritage be distributed across nations, not just reaped by one country, in a benefits-sharing agreement that treaty signatories are still hashing out
The French diplomat slammed the Trump administration’s executive order, issued on April 24, that directs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) to fast-track seabed exploration and commercial mining permits in both U.S. waters and ocean areas beyond America’s jurisdiction — commonly called the high seas..”
Invoking national security to justify private sector economic development is a tired cliché. And yet, in a troubling twist, a Canadian company is invoking U.S. national security to obtain an exclusive license from the U.S. government for a deep-sea mining venture for critical minerals in international waters—and it appears to be working.
Companies leading the push to launch deep-sea mining under a U.S. license are foreign-incorporated entities with no operational footprint—and no meaningful supply chain commitments to it. The timeline for commercial production remains uncertain and subject to indefinite delays due to technical, financial, and regulatory hurdles.
Far from offering strategic value, this initiative is best understood as a speculative venture propped up by shifting political winds. Deep-sea mining is not the answer to a mineral security crisis—it’s a solution to a problem that does not exist.
At the very least, ask for a 60 day extension to the public comment period because of the crucial nature of the proposal. But also express that you strongly oppose consolidating the exploration license and commercial recovery permit process.
Mining in international waters without global consent carries enormous reputational, legal, and financial risks. It could trigger investor pullout, international condemnation, and logistical nightmares. We can make sure it’s simply not worth the cost.
Despite everything, I left Jamaica feeling positive. Progress might be slow, yet things are moving in the right direction. But we can’t afford complacency. This meeting made clear just how fragile international governance really is. Loopholes and silence are letting corporate interests push the system to its limits.
At the same time, I saw how much influence we still have. Scientists, youth, Indigenous leaders, and civil society are shifting the conversation. The pressure we’re building is working — we have to keep going.
Join us in protecting what should never be plundered in the first place:
“We’re too late to know what today’s ocean without oil and gas drilling, whaling and overfishing would look like. We can stop this next great threat before it starts, and save one of the planet’s final frontiers — and the amazing life that lives there. Tell the Interior Department: Don’t mine the deep sea.” https://environmentamerica.org/center/articles/is-the-u-s-going-to-start-deep-sea-mining/
Donald Trump has brought the world together against the U.S. with this dangerous unilateral action.
The deep sea, the planet’s most expansive and least understood ecosystem, remains largely unexplored. Yet while the deep sea may seem a dark and distant space, events underwater directly impact our lives, from essential services like climate regulation to fisheries and the marine food web. While scientific understanding of this realm is nascent, a new industry is rapidly emerging driven by the demand for rare metals essential for batteries, microchips and AI: deep-sea mining.
In the past three years, more than 38 nations have voiced support for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, a rapid pace by the standards of multilateral lawmaking, and the equivalent of one new country signing on per month. This progress marks a major shift from just a few years ago, when states were either supportive of mining, reluctant to take a position, or were simply uninformed.
The triggering of a treaty provision known as the “two-year rule” by the nation of Nauru in 2021, intended to accelerate deep-sea mining in areas beyond national jurisdiction, brought increased attention and scrutiny to the activity. Nevertheless, some private actors are pushing for the granting of applications for commercial deep-sea mining of minerals like copper, nickel and cobalt, despite significant concerns from global leaders, the scientific community and the public at large.
This divergence between scientific understanding and prevailing narratives came into sharp focus at the recent annual meeting of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). There, nations gathered to discuss matters profoundly consequential for the future of the deep ocean. However, there also seemed to be a broad understanding that a strong regulatory framework based on science, equity and precaution must be in place before an informed decision can be taken, and that no mining activities should commence in the meantime.
Moving forward, it’s imperative that we actively counter misinformation, significantly invest in scientific research, and, in the interim, take concrete measures to ensure that deep-sea mining activities do not commence in the absence of clear science, robust regulations, sufficient safeguards, and equity.
Here are the three main myths about deep-sea mining:
‘Deep-sea mining will provide an economic boom and promote global peace and security’
The primary justification for exploiting the seabed rests on a dubious economic premise: that mining’s financial gains will somehow outweigh its environmental costs. Yet, the economic case for deep-sea mining is tenuous at best, and expert indications suggest the burdens will far outstrip any tangible benefits. Deep-sea mining is an inherently capital-intensive endeavor, demanding massive amounts of upfront investment to take part in a high-risk, burgeoning industry. Developing and deploying specialized machinery capable of operating thousands of meters below the surface, under immense pressure and in corrosive conditions, presents unprecedented engineering challenges. The costs associated with exploration, environmental impact assessments, research and development, and then the actual extraction, processing and transport of minerals from such remote and hostile environments are projected to be staggering.
Some argue that deep-sea mining could bolster supply chain security for critical sectors such as defense, transportation, construction and energy. Given the vital importance of these industries to national security, the seabed’s mineral resources become intrinsically linked to the economic futures of nations like the U.S., which view them as a means to diversify mineral access: the majority of such mineral extraction occurs in regions like Africa, South America, Indonesia and Australia, and the supply chains for many of these critical minerals are currently dominated by geopolitical rivals like China, further intensifying the scramble to mine the deep.
However, it is naïve to think that deep-sea mining would address or alleviate global geopolitical tensions. If anything, the pursuit of unilateral deep-sea mining seems more likely to exacerbate fraught international relations, with the consequences spilling over to the global legal order more broadly. Countries should instead consider investing in a more circular economy, responsible sourcing and refining, encouraging innovation to be less metal-dependent, and developing multilateral frameworks to promote responsible and equitable international cooperation for critical metals and minerals.
A glass octopus, a nearly transparent deep sea species whose only visible features are its optic nerve, eyeballs and digestive tract. Image by Schmidt Ocean Institute (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
‘Deep-sea mining will reduce or alleviate the environmental impact of terrestrial mining’
Another justification is that we will be able to move away from many of the environmental and social ills of terrestrial mining. While it is true that terrestrial mining has caused massive deforestation and led to severe human rights abuses in areas like the Democratic Republic of Congo, the idea that shifting mining activity to the sea will ease the pressure on land-based operations is misguided.
As deep-sea competitors arise to challenge the establishment of terrestrial mining, the increased competition will only serve to expand the global footprint of resource extraction and encourage operators to cut corners to stay competitive. When mining activity accelerates, the environmental and social harms produced are likely to follow, leading to an increasingly untenable situation where biodiversity is wiped out and the planet’s capacity to provide ecosystem services depleted. In this scenario, it is local communities and Indigenous groups in the Global South who will suffer most as they become dispossessed of the resources needed for survival, like forests for fuel and fish for food.
While the recovery and restoration of former terrestrial mining sites is possible, with governments increasingly mandating multiyear rejuvenation and rehabilitation projects, the situation in the deep sea is vastly different. Deep-sea recovery is limited and extremely slow on human timescales. Moreover, current scientific knowledge indicates that any restoration effort there would be difficult and cost-prohibitive, if not impossible.
Moreover, the environmental footprint of deep-sea mining activities, particularly for polymetallic nodule extraction — where a single mining project will involve extraction over a very large spatial area spanning thousands of square kilometers — will far exceed the footprint of terrestrial mining, which usually involves a very small and targeted area. If deep-sea mining were to alleviate or replace terrestrial mining, there would need to be multiple of such extraction projects — which would be disastrous for the marine environment and the planet.
The ISA is currently debating how to factor environmental externalities into contractor payments, as harm to these common heritage resources shouldn’t burden society. The requirement to compensate developing countries with large terrestrial mining industries for lost earnings, funded by ISA revenues, suggests the entire exercise could result in a net negative benefit.
A deposit of polymetallic nodules in the Pacific Ocean. Image by Philweb / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
‘Deep-sea mining is necessary for the energy transition’
The need for metals to power the energy transition is largely overstated by deep-sea mining advocates. Their arguments often cite expanding demand for electric vehicles and renewable energy, both cornerstones of the energy transition that currently require large supplies of rare-earth metals and minerals to craft the infrastructure needed to generate and store renewable power. For these advocates, deep-sea mining is presented as the sole means to access adequate supplies of crucial transition minerals.
However, these arguments are built on the false premise that demand for transition metals will continuously rise alongside our demand for energy. Advances in battery chemistry are already helping to reduce demand for cobalt, and circular solutions like recycling can further reduce our reliance on virgin metals obtained through mining, thereby challenging narratives that we are facing an unavoidable mineral deficit unless we turn to the deep seabed.
So, given the high costs and severe environmental risks, why then pursue deep-sea mining? This activity threatens unique deep-sea ecosystems and could irrevocably alter ocean health, impacting life on land. Scientists warn of irreversible damage from sediment plumes, habitat destruction and noise pollution to ecosystems formed over millions of years. Without sufficient baseline data, predicting or mitigating these risks is impossible, mandating caution under the precautionary principle.
Finally, the numbers also do not add up, which means financing deep-sea mining is akin to investing in a financial scam. If we are serious about tackling the unprecedented and existential threats that we are now facing, destructive activities like deep-sea mining surely cannot form part of the equation. It is therefore heartening to see many global leaders and governments voicing their concerns and calling for a pause or moratorium on deep-sea mining.
Pradeep Singh is an ocean governance expert at the Oceano Azul Foundation and holds degrees from the University of Malaya, the University of Edinburgh, and Harvard Law School.
Banner Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2019 Southeastern U.S. Deep-sea Exploration. Public Domain
Editor’s note: “What if you could save the climate while continuing to pollute it?” If that sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. But corporations across the globe are increasingly trying to answer this question with the same shady financial tool: carbon offsets.
To understand what’s going on with the carbon market, it’s important to know the terms(term-oil), vocabulary and organizations involved. For starters, a carbon credit is different from a carbon offset. A carbon credit represents a metric ton of carbon dioxide or the equivalent of other climate-warming gases kept out of the atmosphere. If a company (or individual, or country) uses that credit to compensate for its emissions — perhaps on the way to a claim of reduced net emissions — it becomes an offset.
“We need to pay countries to protect their forests, and that’s just not happening,” Mulder said. But the problem with carbon credits is they are likely to be used as offsets “to enable or justify ongoing emissions,” she said. “The best-case scenario is still not very good. And the worst-case scenario is pretty catastrophic, because we’re just locking in business as usual.”
“Offsetting via carbon credits is another way to balance the carbon checkbook. The idea first took hold in the 1980s and picked up in the following decade. Industrialized countries that ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol became part of a mandatory compliance market, in which a cap-and-trade system limited the quantity of greenhouse gases those countries could emit. An industrialized country emitting over its cap could purchase credits from another industrialized country that emitted less than its quota. Emitters could also offset CO2 by investing in projects that reduced emissions in developing countries, which were not required to have targets.”
Yet, the truth is far darker. Far from being an effective tool, carbon credits have become a convenient smokescreen that allows polluters to continue their damaging practices unchecked. As a result, they’re hastening our descent into environmental and societal breakdown.
The entire framework of carbon credits is based on a single, fatal assumption: that “offsets” can substitute for actual emissions reductions. But instead of cutting emissions, companies and countries are using carbon credits as a cheap alternative to meaningful action. This lack of accountability is pushing us closer to catastrophic climate tipping points, with the far-reaching impacts of climate change and resource depletion threatening the lives of everyone on this planet.
Brazilian prosecutors are calling for the cancellation of the largest carbon credit deal in the Amazon Rainforest, saying it breaks national law and risks harming Indigenous communities.
While marketed as a solution to mitigate climate change, carbon markets have been criticized as a facade for continued extractivism and corporate control of minerals in Africa.
Africa’s vast forests, minerals, and land are increasingly commodified under the guise of carbon offset projects. Global corporations invest in these projects, claiming to “offset” their emissions while continuing business as usual in their countries. This arrangement does little to address emissions at the source and increase exploitation in Africa, where land grabs, displacement, and ecological degradation often accompany carbon offset schemes.
“But beginning in January 2023, The Guardian, together with other news organizations, have published a series of articles that contend the majority of carbon credit sales in their analysis did not lead to the reduction of carbon in the atmosphere. The questions have centered on concepts such as additionality, which refers to whether a credit represents carbon savings over and above what would have happened without the underlying effort, and other methods used to calculate climate benefits.
The series also presented evidence that a Verra-approved conservation project in Peru promoted as a success story for the deforestation it helped to halt resulted in the displacement of local landowners. Corporations like Chevron, the second-largest fossil fuel company in the U.S., purchase carbon credits to bolster their claims of carbon neutrality. But an analysis by the watchdog group Corporate Accountability found that these credits were backed by questionable carbon capture technologies and that Chevron is ignoring the emissions that will result from the burning of the fossil fuels it produces.”
Since 2009, Tesla has had a tidy little side hustle selling the regulatory credits it collects for shifting relatively huge numbers of EVs in markets like China, Europe and California. The company earns the credits selling EVs and then sells them to automakers whose current lineup exceeds emission rules set out in certain territories. This business has proven quite lucrative for Tesla, as Automotive News explains:
The Elon Musk-led manufacturer generated $1.79 billion in regulatory credit revenue last year, an annual filing showed last week. That brought the cumulative total Tesla has raked in since 2009 to almost $9 billion.
“Tesla shouldn’t be considered a car manufacturer: they’re a climate movement profiteer. Most of their profits come from carbon trading. Car companies would run afoul of government regulations and fines for producing high emissions vehicles, but thanks to carbon credits, they can just pay money to companies like Tesla to continue churning out gas guzzlers. In other words, according to Elon Musk’s business model: no gas guzzlers, no Tesla.” – Peter Gelderloos
A LICENSE TO POLLUTE
The carbon offset market is an integral part of efforts to prevent effective climate action
In early November 2023, shortly before the COP28 summit opened in Dubai, a hitherto obscure UAE firm attracted significant media attention around news of their prospective land deals in Africa.
Reports suggested that Blue Carbon—a company privately owned by Sheikh Ahmed al-Maktoum, a member of Dubai’s ruling family—had signed deals promising the firm control over vast tracts of land across the African continent. These deals included an astonishing 10 percent of the landmass in Liberia, Zambia and Tanzania, and 20 percent in Zimbabwe. Altogether, the area equaled the size of Britain.
Blue Carbon intended to use the land to launch carbon offset projects, an increasingly popular practice that proponents claim will help tackle climate change. Carbon offsets involve forest protection and other environmental schemes that are equated to a certain quantity of carbon “credits.” These credits can then be sold to polluters around the world to offset their own emissions. Prior to entering into the negotiations of the massive deal, Blue Carbon had no experience in either carbon offsets or forest management. Nonetheless the firm stood to make billions of dollars from these projects.
Environmental NGOs, journalists and activists quickly condemned the deals as a new “scramble for Africa”—a land grab enacted in the name of climate change mitigation. In response, Blue Carbon insisted the discussions were merely exploratory and would require community consultation and further negotiation before formal approval.
Regardless of their current status, the land deals raise concerns that indigenous and other local communities could be evicted to make way for Blue Carbon’s forest protection plans. In Eastern Kenya, for example, the indigenous Ogiek People were driven out of the Mau Forest in November 2023, an expulsion that lawyers linked to ongoing negotiations between Blue Carbon and Kenya’s president, William Ruto. Protests have also followed the Liberian government’s closed-door negotiations with Blue Carbon, with activists claiming the project violates the land rights of indigenous people enshrined within Liberian law. Similar cases of land evictions elsewhere have led the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Francisco Calí Tzay, to call for a global moratorium on carbon offset projects.
Beyond their potentially destructive impact on local communities, Blue Carbon’s activities in Africa point to a major shift in the climate strategies of Gulf states. As critics have shown, the carbon offsetting industry exists largely as a greenwashing mechanism, allowing polluters to hide their continued emissions behind the smokescreen of misleading carbon accounting methodologies while providing a profitable new asset class for financial actors. As the world’s largest exporters of crude oil and liquified natural gas, the Gulf states are now positioning themselves across all stages of this new industry—including the financial markets where carbon credits are bought and sold. This development is reconfiguring the Gulf’s relationships with the African continent and will have significant consequences for the trajectories of our warming planet.
False Accounting and Carbon Laundering
There are many varieties of carbon offset projects. The most common involves the avoided deforestation schemes that make up the bulk of Blue Carbon’s interest in African land. In these schemes, land is enclosed and protected from deforestation. Carbon offset certifiers—of which the largest in the world is the Washington-based firm, Verra—then assess the amount of carbon these projects prevent from being released into the atmosphere (measured in tons of CO2). Once assessed, carbon credits can be sold to polluters, who use them to cancel out their own emissions and thus meet their stated climate goals.
Superficially attractive—after all, who doesn’t want to see money going into the protection of forests?—such schemes have two major flaws. The first is known as “permanence.” Buyers who purchase carbon credits gain the right to pollute in the here and now. Meanwhile, it takes hundreds of years for those carbon emissions to be re-absorbed from the atmosphere, and there is no guarantee that the forest will continue to stand for that timeframe. If a forest fire occurs or the political situation changes and the forest is destroyed, it is too late to take back the carbon credits that were initially issued. This concern is not simply theoretical. In recent years, California wildfires have consumed millions of hectares of forest, including offsets purchased by major international firms such as Microsoft and BP. Given the increasing incidence of forest fires due to global warming, such outcomes will undoubtedly become more frequent.
Again, this estimate depends on an unknowable future, opening up significant profit-making opportunities for companies certifying and selling carbon credits.
The second major flaw with these schemes is that any estimation of carbon credits for avoided deforestation projects rests on an imaginary counterfactual: How much carbon would have been released if the offset project were not in place? Again, this estimate depends on an unknowable future, opening up significant profit-making opportunities for companies certifying and selling carbon credits. By inflating the estimated emissions reductions associated with a particular project, it is possible to sell many more carbon credits than are actually warranted. This scope for speculation is one reason why the carbon credit market is so closely associated with repeated scandals and corruption. Indeed, according to reporting in the New Yorker, after one massive carbon fraud was revealed in Europe, “the Danish government admitted that eighty per cent of the country’s carbon-trading firms were fronts for the racket.”[1]
These methodological problems are structurally intrinsic to offsetting and cannot be avoided. As a result, most carbon credits traded today are fictitious and do not result in any real reduction in carbon emissions. Tunisian analyst Fadhel Kaboub describes them as simply “a license to pollute.”[2] One investigative report from early 2023 found that more than 90 percent of rainforest carbon credits certified by Verra were likely bogus and did not represent actual carbon reductions. Another study conducted for the EU Commission reported that 85 percent of the offset projects established under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism failed to reduce emissions. A recent academic study of offset projects across six countries, meanwhile, found that most did not reduce deforestation, and for those that did, the reductions were significantly lower than initially claimed. Consequently, the authors conclude, carbon credits sold for these projects were used to “offset almost three times more carbon emissions than their actual contributions to climate change mitigation.”[3]
Despite these fundamental problems—or perhaps because of them—the use of carbon offsets is growing rapidly. The investment bank Morgan Stanley predicts that the market will be worth $250 billion by 2050, up from about $2 billion in 2020, as large polluters utilize offsetting to sanction their continued carbon emissions while claiming to meet net zero targets. In the case of Blue Carbon, one estimate found that the amount of carbon credits likely to be accredited through the firm’s projects in Africa would equal all of the UAE’s annual carbon emissions. Akin to carbon laundering, this practice allows ongoing emissions to disappear from the carbon accounting ledger, swapped for credits that have little basis in reality.
Monetizing Nature as a Development Strategy
For the African continent, the growth of these new carbon markets cannot be separated from the escalating global debt crisis that has followed the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. According to a new database, Debt Service Watch, the Global South is experiencing its worst debt crisis on record, with one-third of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa spending over half their budget revenues on servicing debt. Faced with such unprecedented fiscal pressures, the commodification of land through offsetting is now heavily promoted by international lenders and many development organizations as a way out of the deep-rooted crisis.
The African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI), an alliance launched in 2022 at the Cairo COP27 summit, has emerged as a prominent voice in this new development discourse. ACMI brings together African leaders, carbon credit firms (including Verra), Western donors (USAID, the Rockefeller Foundation and Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund) and multilateral organizations like the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Along with practical efforts to mobilize funds and encourage policy changes, ACMI has taken a lead role in advocating for carbon markets as a win-win solution for both heavily indebted African countries and the climate. In the words of the organization’s founding document, “The emergence of carbon credits as a new product allows for the monetization of Africa’s large natural capital endowment, while enhancing it.”[4]
ACMI’s activities are deeply tied to the Gulf. One side to this relationship is that Gulf firms, especially fossil fuel producers, are now the key source of demand for future African carbon credits. At the September 2023 African Climate Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, for example, a group of prominent Emirati energy and financial firms (known as the UAE Carbon Alliance) committed to purchasing $450 million worth of carbon credits from ACMI over the next six years. The pledge immediately confirmed the UAE as ACMI’s biggest financial backer. Moreover, by guaranteeing demand for carbon credits for the rest of this decade, the UAE’s pledge helps create the market today, driving forward new offset projects and solidifying their place in the development strategies of African states. It also helps legitimize offsetting as a response to the climate emergency, despite the numerous scandals that have beset the industry in recent years.
Saudi Arabia is likewise playing a major role in pushing forward carbon markets in Africa. One of ACMI’s steering committee members is the Saudi businesswoman, Riham ElGizy, who heads the Regional Voluntary Carbon Market Company (RVCMC). Established in 2022 as a joint venture between the Public Investment Fund (Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund) and the Saudi stock exchange, Tadawul, RVCMC has organized the world’s two largest carbon auctions, selling more than 3.5 million tons worth of carbon credits in 2022 and 2023. 70 percent of the credits sold in these auctions were sourced from offset projects in Africa, with the 2023 auction taking place in Kenya. The principal buyers of these credits were Saudi firms, led by the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco.
Beyond simply owning offset projects in Africa, the Gulf states are also positioning themselves at the other end of the carbon value chain: the marketing and sale of carbon credits to regional and international buyers.
The Emirati and Saudi relationships with ACMI and the trade in African carbon credits illustrate a notable development when it comes to the Gulf’s role in these new markets. Beyond simply owning offset projects in Africa, the Gulf states are also positioning themselves at the other end of the carbon value chain: the marketing and sale of carbon credits to regional and international buyers. In this respect, the Gulf is emerging as a key economic space where African carbon is turned into a financial asset that can be bought, sold and speculated upon by financial actors across the globe.
Indeed, the UAE and Saudi Arabia have each sought to establish permanent carbon exchanges, where carbon credits can be bought and sold just like any other commodity. The UAE set up the first such trading exchange following an investment by the Abu Dhabi-controlled sovereign wealth fund, Mubadala, in the Singapore-based AirCarbon Exchange (ACX) in September 2022. As part of this acquisition, Mubadala now owns 20 percent of ACX and has established a regulated digital carbon trading exchange in Abu Dhabi’s financial free zone, the Abu Dhabi Global Market. ACX claims the exchange is the first regulated exchange of its kind in the world, with the trade in carbon credits beginning there in late 2023. Likewise, in Saudi Arabia the RVCMC has partnered with US market technology firm Xpansiv to establish a permanent carbon credit exchange set to launch in late 2024.
Whether these two Gulf-based exchanges will compete or prioritize different trading instruments, such as carbon derivatives or Shariah-compliant carbon credits, remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that major financial centers in the Gulf are leveraging their existing infrastructures to establish regional dominance in the sale of carbon. Active at all stages of the offsetting industry—from generating carbon credits to purchasing them—the Gulf is now a principal actor in the new forms of wealth extraction that connect the African continent to the wider global economy.
Entrenching a Fossil-Fueled Future
Over the past two decades, the Gulf’s oil and especially gas production has grown markedly, alongside a substantial eastward shift in energy exports to meet the new hydrocarbon demand from China and East Asia. At the same time, the Gulf states have expanded their involvement in energy-intensive downstream sectors, notably the production of petrochemicals, plastics and fertilizers. Led by Saudi Aramco and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, Gulf-based National Oil Companies now rival the traditional Western oil supermajors in key metrics such as reserves, refining capacity and export levels.
Rather, much like the big Western oil companies, the Gulf’s vision of expanded fossil fuel production is accompanied by an attempt to seize the leadership of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
In this context—and despite the reality of the climate emergency—the Gulf states are doubling down on fossil fuel production, seeing much to be gained from hanging on to an oil-centered world for as long as possible. As the Saudi oil minister vowed back in 2021, “every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”[5] But this approach does not mean the Gulf states have adopted a stance of head-in-the-sand climate change denialism. Rather, much like the big Western oil companies, the Gulf’s vision of expanded fossil fuel production is accompanied by an attempt to seize the leadership of global efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
One side to this approach is their heavy involvement in flawed and unproven low carbon technologies, like hydrogen and carbon capture. Another is their attempts to steer global climate negotiations, seen in the recent UN climate change conferences, COP27 and COP28, where the Gulf states channeled policy discussions away from effective efforts to phase out fossil fuels, turning these events into little more than corporate spectacles and networking forums for the oil industry.
The carbon offset market should be viewed as an integral part of these efforts to delay, obfuscate and obstruct addressing climate change in meaningful ways. Through the deceptive carbon accounting of offset projects, the big oil and gas industries in the Gulf can continue business as usual while claiming to meet their so-called climate targets. The Gulf’s dispossession of African land is key to this strategy, ultimately enabling the disastrous specter of ever-accelerating fossil fuel production.
This statement, published on July 2, 2024, responds to the growing efforts of corporations to greenwash their greenhouse gas emissions by buying “credits” for supposed emission reductions elsewhere. It is signed by more than 80 leading civil society organizations.
Editor’s note: “Birds and Offshore Wind: Developing the Offshore Wind that Birds Need”. – 2025 National Audubon Society
With up to a million birds currently being killed each year directly(which does not include indirect causes from mining and manufacturing) by wind turbines in the US, why would an organization dedicated to protecting birds say such a thing? Add on the fact that Wind facilities also require relatively large areas of land and sea. Facility development fragments and otherwise alters habitat in ways that make it unsuitable for species that have historically been present.
Report: “Conflicts of Interest” – Environmental Organizations(Audubon among them) Take Offshore Wind Industry Money
“These offshore projects, which could decimate hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, will be built by some of the largest international oil and gas companies in the world,” the group said. “Our findings take on suspended belief when one considers Ørsted’s involvement with the New Jersey Audubon Society.” The Danish company is the official sponsor of the New Jersey Audubon Society’s fundraiser, the World Series of Birding where funds are raised to support bird conservation.
Sixteen shorebird species have been reclassified to higher threat categories as the global population of migratory shorebirds across the world saw a substantial decline, according to the latest update to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
Conservation partnership BirdLife International, which helps examine the status of the world’s birds for the IUCN Red List, reassessed around half of the 254 species of shorebirds the organization currently monitors, for 2024, according to Ian Burfield, BirdLife International’s global science coordinator.
The reassessment was prompted by a study published last year that showed steep declines in many shorebird species in North America, Burfield told Mongabay via email.
“[B]ut as it only covered part of their global populations, we had to source equivalent data from elsewhere … to produce a global picture, before applying the IUCN Red List criteria to reassess their status,” Burfield said. “Most species did not need recategorizing, but of those that did, virtually all have deteriorated.”
After the latest reassessment, seven of the 16 shorebird species were categorized as “near threatened” and nine are now “vulnerable” to extinction as they experienced global population declines of 20-40% over three generations.
BirdLife International said in a statement that migratory birds are especially at risk as they follow specific migration flyways or routes and stop along the way to rest and feed at certain sites that now face threats like habitat loss and climate change impacts.
“While many of these shorebirds remain numerous and are still commonly encountered along their flyways, new analyses of data from long-term monitoring schemes reveal that the global populations of some species have declined by more than a third in recent decades,” Burfield said in the statement.
Among those that have now been moved into a higher “threatened” category of vulnerable are the gray plover(Pluvialis squatarola)and the curlew sandpiper (Calidris ferruginea), both of which breed in various parts of the Arctic and migrate globally during their nonbreeding seasons. They both face threats from habitat loss and degradation, hunting, and climate change impacts.
The Hudsonian godwit (Limosa haemastica), a large shorebird that breeds in northern Canada and Alaska and migrates to South America during its nonbreeding months, is also now considered vulnerable. The IUCN notes in its assessment of the species that the bird’s population is seeing a “significant decline … most severely noted in numbers recorded at migratory sites in North America.”
BirdLife International said in its statement that protecting shorebirds is also important for the coastal communities that depend on the same habitats as the birds.
‘The perilous declines of migratory birds are a sign that the integrity of flyways is deteriorating,” Burfield said. “Losing the network of habitats that migratory birds depend on to rest and feed during their long journeys could have severe consequences for the millions of people that rely on these sites, as well as the birds.’’
Kristine Sabillo is a wire reporter for Mongabay. She has been a multimedia journalist for more than a decade and has produced political, science and environment content for the online, print, television and radio newsrooms of leading media organizations in the Philippines. Feedback: Use this form to send a message to this author. If you want to post a public comment, you can do that at the bottom of the article page.
Growing up in a Pakistani village in the 2000s, sustainability was embedded throughout my daily life. My family has always been cautious of wasting energy, gas or water because these resources are expensive. We grew most of our own vegetables and reared poultry for eggs. By just buying a few essential groceries from the nearby market, we produced very little household waste. Food scraps were fed to our cattle, and we’d save any plastic bags to reuse.
The United Nations defines sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”. But so much complicated jargon makes it difficult to distinguish between environmentally ethical practices and mere feelgood marketing.
Some major brands and big corporations promote and package their products as more eco-friendly than they actually are. In 1986, American environmentalist Jay Westerveld coined the term “greenwash” to describe hotels that were promoting towel reuse as an environmentally conscious initiative, when it was really a cost-cutting measure.
Today, greenwashing encompasses a wide range of deceptive marketing tactics, but as consumers, we have the right to know the true environmental impact of our choices. Here are four ways to avoid being duped by greenwashing:
1. Look for marketing buzzwords
Look out for feelgood marketing and buzzwords such as “natural”, “eco-friendly”, “sustainable” and “green”. These labels can be open-ended, without a technical definition or any legal requirements. For example, the term “compostable” differs from “home compostable” – it requires industrial processing with high temperatures, even though it may sound eco-friendly.
There’s no legal time limit for calling something degradable – everything breaks up eventually, even plastic bags.
There is no such thing as a totally carbon-free product. Every process, every product, every supply chain has carbon emissions associated with it. So any marketing language should mirror the impact of that particular product or brand.
Some brands use cute-looking emojis and caricatures with buzzwords that look similar to some certifications, but in reality, they are meaningless. To address this, the European Commission recently proposed a directive, requiring companies to back up green claims with evidence, focusing on life-cycle and environmental footprint methods, setting minimum requirements for sustainability labels and logos.
2. Verify any claims
Pause before you purchase anything and demand evidence to back up any claims that a brand makes.
Either look for statistics that prove the claims on a company’s website, third-party certification or ask the brand and supplier for the evidence of their claims. If they are truly eco-conscious, they’ll proudly share the real numbers.
3. Look for certification
Legit third-party certifications like the EU-mandated energy labels provide valuable and true information about the energy efficiency of household electric appliances. Don’t fall for random stickers that give the impression of formal validation but don’t require any specific criteria to be met.
Plastic recycling labels can be confusing too. The triangle with three chasing arrows, called the Mobius Loop is a universal symbol that means “recyclable”. But, the Mobius Loop with a number in it indicates the type of plastic (there are seven different types) – not that the packaging is recyclable.
Even if technically recyclable, plastic needs to be dry, clean and separated before being recycled. One plastic water bottle may contain three or four different types of plastics, from the bottle itself to the cap and label. Together as a composite, some can be difficult to recycle.
Tthe new tethered bottle caps are mandated by the EU to prevent litter, but they still don’t make recycling any easier.
4. Take a big picture view
Some companies genuinely care. For 35 years, outdoor clothing company Patagonia has pledged 1% of sales to conservation. More than US$89 million (£69 million) has been donated to environmental groups globally through its 1% for the Planet initiative. Cosmetics retailer Lush is working hard to close the loop by limiting water consumption and preventing as much packaging waste as possible.
Investigate the brand’s overall effort to be transparent and environmentally friendly, rather than just looking at one product. If companies aren’t setting clear targets, sharing their progress and being open with their customers, switch to brands that do provide the evidence, listen to their customers and respond.
As paying customers, we have a right to know the environmental footprint of the products and services we’re buying.
Burning wood to generate electricity — “biomass energy” — is increasingly being pursued as a renewable replacement for burning coal in nations like the U.K., Japan, and South Korea — even though its emissions aren’t carbon neutral in practice.
On this episode of the Mongabay Newscast, reporter Justin Catanoso speaks with Rachel Donald about the single largest emitter of CO2 in the U.K., biomass firm Drax, which is trying to open two wood pellet plants in the state of California.
Catanoso explains how years of investigation helped him uncover a complicated web of public relations messaging that obscures the fact that replanting trees after cutting them down and burning them is not in practice carbon neutral or renewable and severely harms global biodiversity and forests.
“When those trees get ripped out, that carbon gets released. And that comes before we process this wood and ship it … then we burn it and don’t count those emissions. This is just [an] imponderable policy,” he says on this episode.
Justin Catanoso is no stranger to wood pellet plants, as he lives near four of them in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where biomass giant Enviva has several facilities. While that company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this year, it remains the single largest producer of wood pellets globally.
This firm is one of several (alongside Drax in the U.K.) seeking to expand its global stake in the shift to renewable energy — a category of energy generation that industry and regulators insist burning biomass belongs in. However, a recent analysis shows it’s not renewable and adds more carbon to the atmosphere than coal and gas. But due to complicated language in the Kyoto Protocol treaty that extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, several nations and the European Union still allow the burning of wood pellets to be counted as such, and thus made eligible for subsidies, too. This is a tremendous problem for global efforts to slow the biodiversity and climate crises, Catanoso says.
“In my area of North Carolina, which is the mid-Atlantic, we will have the climate of northern Florida in about 15 years. That’s how fast our climate is changing here,” Catanoso says. “It’s upon us, and we are not pulling the levers fast enough. To slow this down and cutting down trees, calling it carbon neutral … that’s just one of those loopholes that is just completely man-made.”
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Rachel Donald is a climate corruption reporter and the creator of Planet: Critical, the podcast and newsletter for a world in crisis. Her latest thoughts can be found at 𝕏 via @CrisisReports and at Bluesky via @racheldonald.bsky.social.
Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Instagram.
