Episode Details

Carbon credits were designed as a market mechanism to incentivize projects that sequester carbon and reduce carbon emissions. The idea is to pay people who are doing climate friendly projects, and sell credits to emitters. But do they work? Is there independent verification that carbon is really being sequestered? What does it mean when people are being paid for projects they would have been doing anyway? And who's really profiting? Ecosystem scientist Jane Zelikova, director of the Soil Carbon Solutions Center at Colorado State University, guides us through these questions and more.