The Great Cash-for-Carbon Hustle

People in the area suggest that the project’s impact has been minimal. Iain Foulds, a white Zimbabwean farmer who has become an outspoken critic of Kariba, told me, “It’s nothing to do with the environment or safeguarding our flora and fauna. This was about money. Yes, there’s a bit of petty cash filtering in here and there for their little projects. But the big bucks—where’s all that going?” Nevertheless, community leaders are wary of losing whatever benefit they receive. In June, I spoke with Elmon Mudenda, who joined a video call from a dimly lit room, with cracked plaster and peeling paint. His great fear was that the project would be deserted. “At the end of the day, who suffers is the community. Nobody else,” he told me.

The next month, Follow the Money published another story. Reporters had visited the project site, and disaffected locals had shown them a series of abandoned vegetable gardens. The lead author, Ties Gijzel, told me he and his reporting partners had also heard that Wentzel was involved in trophy hunting.

Big-game hunting is legal in Zimbabwe, but South Pole has portrayed the Kariba project as a haven for wildlife, protecting “numerous endangered species such as the African elephant, the lion, the hippopotamus.” When I questioned Wentzel, he acknowledged that trophy hunting occurs across the project area. He had taken control of the sport himself in one region, granting rights to an operator named Dalton & York, whose Instagram page has dozens of images of hunters displaying dead lions, elephants, and crocodiles. In one, a grinning man holds up the carcass of a leopard as blood drips down his forearms. A video shows hippos being shot through the head as they wallow in the Zambezi.

Over the summer, the Zimbabwean government announced plans to centralize control of carbon-trading projects within its borders, and to seize thirty per cent of future profits. Wentzel told me that he didn’t much care what happened to Kariba. “It’s no skin off my nose,” he said. He was already planning a new venture, which he described as “Kariba on steroids.” In his scheme, local women might be employed to stitch car mats for Porsche or to sew beads onto Gucci accessories—though he confessed that neither brand had agreed to the endeavor. He was “struggling to think of something for Nespresso,” he said, but he had been working on a deal to sell driftwood lampshades to an American furniture catalogue. He has already registered the new business in Ireland, under the name Fair Share.

Sylvera, the most prominent of a small group of ratings agencies that are seeking to improve transparency in the carbon market, occupies a plant-filled office in an unassuming building in London. When I visited this June, I was met by the chief executive, Allister Furey, a round-cheeked man in sneakers and a vaguely psychedelic T-shirt.

Furey, a neurobiologist with a Ph.D. in machine learning, worked for a decade in renewable energy before becoming fixated on carbon removal. In order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, the U.N. has said, humanity will need to find a way to suck around ten gigatons of carbon a year out of the atmosphere. “The scale of the challenge is so extreme,” Furey told me. “You need to move trillions and trillions of dollars.” Carbon offsetting seemed like a viable source of that kind of funding, so Sylvera was founded in 2020 to stimulate investment by sorting out the good credits from the junk. Since then, using spaceborne radar and satellite imagery, it has estimated that some eighty per cent of the forest-carbon projects it rated were likely over-crediting. “People get paid more for issuing a higher number of credits without going to prison, so there’s a very strong incentive,” Furey said.

Recently, two new initiatives have arisen to encourage higher standards. The Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, launched with backing from the British government, set guidelines to deter corporations from making vacuous claims about the benefits of offsetting. The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, a successor of Mark Carney’s task force, announced a set of “Core Carbon Principles” to assess the quality of existing schemes. “If you build integrity, scale will follow,” Annette Nazareth, the council’s chair, told me. But an analysis by the carbon-data firm Trove Research found that ninety-five per cent of projects on the market would fail to meet these new standards.

Yet offsetting remains central to global plans to reach net zero. The Paris Agreement, signed in 2016, envisaged a new carbon-trading framework—though the details are still being debated seven years later. More than two-thirds of participating countries plan to use offsets to meet their goals, and an alliance of governments and industry figures is lobbying for forest-based projects to be included in the new system.

Experts told me they feared that the same registries they blamed for catastrophic mismanagement of the voluntary market would, by virtue of sheer convenience, end up taking a central role in the U.N. process. Axel Michaelowa, a researcher at the University of Zurich who co-authored several U.N. climate reports, said Verra had been telling officials that, if they used its verification services, “you’ll have a one-stop shop—you don’t have to pay a single cent.” That, he said, “would of course mean that all the shortcomings of these private programs would contaminate the compliance market.”

This November, when world leaders gather in Dubai for the U.N.’s annual climate summit, they will seek agreement on the principles of the new system. To lead the summit, the host country, one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels, has appointed the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.

One afternoon this July, I met Heuberger at the Technopark. The sky over the city was cobalt blue, and the air felt strikingly clean. We strolled along the Limmat, passing city workers shedding their suits to dive into the water, then turned up a set of dilapidated steps to his house—an unobtrusive cream-colored structure, set into the hillside above the river. When I remarked on its modesty, he nodded. “It was not cheap, but it’s way far away from the villas you can see,” he said, gesturing at the mansions up the hill. Heuberger also has a pied-à-terre near Davos, but he insisted that the allure of business had never really been about money. He saw building his company as a kind of game: “All of us are driven, of course, by winning.”

For the moment, Heuberger was winning his latest fight—what he called the “shitstorm” in the carbon market. He blamed a handful of enemies: Muench, environmental campaigners, oil companies funding secret plots to destroy those seeking to put a price on carbon. As he enumerated these annoyances, he batted his hands in the air, as if swatting gnats. “We are stubborn, whack-a-mole people,” he said. “You can slap us as many times as you want. We always come up.” In recent weeks, Heuberger had been working to “change the narrative.” He had revealed plans to collaborate on carbon-removal projects with Mitsubishi, and had travelled to London for Climate Week, where he joined a panel on preventing misinformation around offsetting. Though his company had spent years awarding its clients badges that proclaimed them “Carbon Neutral,” Heuberger dismissed this designation onstage as “an easy catchphrase.” The times demanded a new approach, he said: “We have to become robust and honest.” To that end, South Pole was launching a new insignia. Its penguin logo would now be encircled with the words “This Company Funds Climate Action.” The announcement was met with cautious applause.

At his house, Heuberger led me through a garden overgrown with lavender and brambles, and into a sparsely furnished living room, where a baby’s play mat was the only splash of color. He has four daughters with his wife, Zani, whom he met in Indonesia while scouting projects for South Pole. Their youngest was born last year. When he talked to his daughters about climate change, he said, he focussed exclusively on messages of empowerment and optimism: “There’s no climate anxiety at all in our house.”

On a deck with sweeping views of the city, Zani was grilling sausages, halloumi, and tempeh kebabs. After dinner, Heuberger sat sipping wine with his feet tucked under him, and grew a little maudlin as he gazed out over the dimming skyline. “We were eating dry bread for many years, happy that we just survived,” he said. “I’m sounding like an old guy now. But I look at those young kids who come with their blockchain-enabled super-transparent solution, and say everything has been shit, what we did. O.K. Calculate Kariba credits. Good luck. It’s not that easy.” In my earlier conversations with Heuberger, he had parried every perceived slight or criticism, but as we kept talking those defenses seemed to slip. He confessed that it had been hard to maintain his positivity. “When you think you have done the right thing, something goes wrong, and somebody says you had bad intentions—that’s the most harmful,” he said. “You have to build a thick wall between you and your true feelings, which are of course depressing.”

He told me he was spending a lot of time cycling these days, on the same battered Titan road bike he had bought with saved-up pocket money as a boy. “I had my beliefs and my convictions and my bicycle,” he recalled fondly. “I was in my own world.” To lift his spirits, he had also taken up the cello again—another childhood pursuit—and started singing lessons. “Except for me, everyone else is a little kid at the class,” he said. In a few weeks, he was due to appear in an amateur opera, a production of “Hansel and Gretel.” Heuberger had been cast as the children’s father—“the bad guy, the weird guy”—who returns triumphantly from a profitable day at the market to find that his children have been abandoned alone in the forest. “He doesn’t really understand,” Heuberger said. “He thinks he’s doing a good thing. But he doesn’t get it at all.” ♦