THE NEW GREENWASHING

The mission: Keep pumping, fill your pockets

What’s missing from our efforts against climate change? The global bureaucracies of corporate climate inaction have a new idea: ‘Blue Carbon’, or more specifically, as the bods at the International Monetary Fund put it: a ‘financial facility’ to ‘subsidize… whales’ CO₂ sequestration efforts’.¹

In other words: pay whale killers to desist, so our ocean-dwelling cousins can store more carbon in their bodies. The IMF report’s authors estimate the value of allowing whales to return to pre-whaling numbers, ‘capturing 1.7 billion tons of CO₂ annually’, at around $13 per person per year.

Other ‘ecosystem services’ from the marine world could bring yet more benefits, it is argued. An Ocean-Based Climate Solutions bill has already been introduced to the US Congress. Using elephants to sequester carbon has also been proposed.² Meanwhile Big Oil continues to ramp up production.

Netting zeroes

Trick 1: Distract, delay, obfuscate

Where do whales and elephants fit into climate inaction? Let’s back up a bit.

How bad the climate crisis gets is largely dependent on how much fossil