Hello and welcome to the Strawman, the daily climate newsletter that’s got you covered like a tent in a hailstorm.

Today we’re covering new reports in to Chevron’s carbon offsets projects and it turns out things ain’t what they seemed. Let’s get in to it.

Early Onset Offset Collapse

A report by Corporate Accountability, the aptly named non-profit focused on bringing a lens to corporate malpractice, dropped this week and they’re bringing the heat. The report alleges that Chevron’s carbon offsets are mostly junk and, in some cases, having a negative impact on the environment.

Chevron is the second largest fossil fuel company in the US with operations across five continents and over $35bn of profits last year. All of this scale comes with a hell of a lot of emissions, in fact 57m metric tons worth of CO2 comes from their operations and production alone.

In a bid to offset these, Chevron spends 100s of millions of dollars on carbon offsets and associated projects. These new reports however, suggest the limited work Chevron is doing, is not particularly helpful. 93% of these carbon offsets were assessed as basically useless or in some cases, even negative. Well great.

Emissions are too Dam high

A significant recipient of Chevron’s carbon credits are in the plantation and large hydroelectric dam space. Both of these types of projects are criticised for having ‘low environmental integrity’.

In other words, they don’t actually reduce carbon emissions to the scale they say they will and the risks they say they’ll mitigate aren’t as bad as they claim. Like a multi-level-marketing scheme, if it sounds like it’s too good to be true, it probably is.

On top of all this, almost half of Chevron’s corporate communication has a mention of ‘green claims’ despite them spending less than 0.25% of their total investments on low-carbon technologies. It’s like a green-washing 1-2 combo. Hit them with the left hook of ineffective carbon capture technologies and the right hook of a green campaign. They won’t know what hit ‘em.

Manifesting Net Zero

As part of their climate strategy, Chevron announced that they ‘aspire to achieve net zero upstream emission by 2050.’ Yep, we know. it seems like they’re just trying to manifest the green transition with ‘crystals’ and ‘energy.

Let’s break it down a bit.

Remember scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions? Well Chevron is sticking to 1 and 2 and saying that all of their own operation and production emissions will be offset but they’re not touching their scope 3 emissions. Their scope 3 emissions make up 92% of their total. So in other words, they’re not even considering these. Kind hard to pass an exam if you only answer 10% of the questions…

This damning new report has come just as the company prepares for its annual shareholders meeting on 31 May. As you can expect, it’s going to be a heated one.

Until next time,

The Strawman