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How to Sell ‘Carbon Neutral’ Fossil Fuel That Doesn’t Exist

August 12, 2021

How to Sell ‘Carbon Neutral’ Fossil Fuel That Doesn’t Exist

Energy companies are starting to pitch the idea that planet-warming natural gas can be erased by paying villagers to protect forests. Experts can’t make the math work.

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Volunteers clear vegetation that would otherwise stoke wildfires in forests around their village near Mbire, Zimbabwe. Their work is funded, in part, by the sale of fossil fuel thousands of miles away.

Photographer: Cynthia Matonhodze/Bloomberg

Total had proposed the trade after learning a client had already purchased two carbon-neutral cargos from rivals at Royal Dutch Shell Plc, according to people with knowledge of the deal who asked not to be named discussing a private transaction. One of these insiders said that only after getting the go-ahead did the inexperienced team attempt to figure out how to neutralize the emissions contained in a hulking tanker full of liquified natural gas. Their first step was to search the internet for worthy environmental projects that might offset the pollution.

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‘This whole bush can be razed to the ground if we don’t do what we’re doing,’ says Kembo Magonyo, one of the volunteers.
Photographer: Cynthia Matonhodze/Bloomberg

Thousands of miles away, a Zimbabwean volunteer named Kembo Magonyo would spend the spring months clearing stubborn jumbles of branches near the thickly forested border with Mozambique. Wildfires tend to leap between the two countries, laying waste to trees before anyone can respond. “This whole bush can be razed to the ground if we don’t do what we’re doing,” Magonyo says, hacking away with his machete. His work is organized by a group partly funded by Total’s carbon-neutral deal.

In the complicated new math of climate solutions, villagers clearing brush in southern Africa can end up redefining networks of global commerce worth billions of dollars. Environmental projects stand as shadow partners to emission-heavy energy trades happening far away.

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