"This might just be the world's first truly ethical offseting scheme."
John Grant, Author of The Green Marketing ManifestoDodgy dealings #2
This month’s offset related outrage is brought to you from Liberia, where a British company stands accused of scamming Liberian ministers in a ploy that would have left the government liable to pay $2.2bn of costs.
The alleged ‘improprieties’ regard a proposed deal by the Carbon Harvesting Corporation (CHC), based in the northwest of England, to generate carbon credits from Liberia’s forests. The proposal, seen by the Guardian, was for the Liberian government to grant 400,000 hectares of forest as a concession to CHC, who would then generate carbon offset credits, based on ‘avoided deforestation’, from it. A government department had calculated the potential number of offset credits that could be generated at 162m.
The hitch came in the shape of a clause which left the Liberian government liable to make up the difference in costs if the forests failed to generate the forecast number of credits. This could have incurred costs of up to $2.2bn, for a country with a GDP of $1.6bn.
