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By Heidi Blake
One night in November 2021, a men’s organization gathered at dusk on the terrace of Camp Ruckomechi, a safari hotel on the Zambezi River. Since they arrived by personal plane, they had to practice with the lions, went down the river by boat, and disembarked on a giant tiger fish; Now they were providing gin and tonics. Hippos wallowed in the water.
The party was headed by Renat Heuberger, a forty-four-year-old Swiss businessman with narrowed eyes and a very short copper beard. Heuberger, CEO of South Pole, the world’s largest carbon offset company, had come to Zimbabwe to fight a pressing risk to his business.
A decade earlier, South Pole had signed an agreement to sell carbon offsets as part of an effort to protect a vast swath of forest on the shores of Lake Kariba, upstream of the camp. The Kariba project, which covers a domain ten times larger than New York City, was one of the world’s first “avoided deforestation” programs; By discouraging local people from cutting down trees, it promises to prevent the release of tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gases. Major companies, including Volkswagen, Gucci, Nestle, Porsche and Delta Air Lines, have paid the South Pole only about $100 million for Kariba credits, which will allow them to market goods or as “carbon neutral. “
South Pole has introduced a style of carbon offsetting that is one of our most productive hopes for averting climate catastrophe: a mechanism that diverts the budget from polluters in rich countries to protect ecosystems in the Global South. Heuberger, a dynamic and bombastic man, speaks for a long time. about their mission. ” We’re here to save the climate,” he told me.
As a child, Heuberger spent his free time taping protest leaflets to car windows and considered himself an activist. But, as he built his business, he had developed a logo of climate-friendly optimism. “It’s not true that to save the climate, we’re all going to have to block or prevent fun,” he said, promoting Porsche’s rebate program. “In fact, it’s quite the opposite”: Drivers deserve to enjoy their vehicles, knowing that “every ton of CO2 they offset is subsidized through a verified emissions reduction. “
This prospect was enthusiastically received: Heuberger gave a lecture in Davos and was part of the World Economic Forum’s network of experts. As brands looked for cheap tactics to reduce emissions, the offset market exploded, quadrupling in 2021 alone. That year, the South Pole was valued at $1 billion, making it the world’s first “carbon unicorn. “
But alarming news had reached the company’s headquarters in Zurich: it was in danger of squandering its most lucrative project. Under the terms of the Kariba deal, the company purchased carbon credits from a developer overseeing forest land on the domain and sold them for a twenty-five percent commission price. A competitor had offered the developer a very large sum to take over the project. To help him craft an answer, Heuberger turned to an old school friend, Dirk Muench, who had recently reached the South Pole. he had abandoned Wall Street to weather the action in the poorest places in the world. He was a self-confessed demanding man and perhaps too demanding for Heuberger’s taste, but he was a professional negotiator.
When Muench heard the details, he was surprised that South Pole had done so little to secure his most vital project. The entire deal was based on a superficial contract that the developer, a white Zimbabwean tycoon named Steve Wentzel, could break at any time. To secure Wentzel’s loyalty, Muench suggested Heuberger buy a stake in his company. They flew to Harare and took a chartered plane to the safari camp to conduct the negotiations in style.
Wentzel, a slender, chiseled guy with silver cuts on the sides, a former jumper who made his fortune in offshore finance and then began investing in gold mining. During a safari, he confided that he had no experience in preserving forests. ; He had tried to offset carbon emissions on a whim, when he presented a piece of land in payment of a debt. (He told me the same story in July. ) I don’t know anything,” he said. “I’m not a skilled tree or something. “)
Muench began to feel disturbed. A basic precept of carbon offsetting is that the benefits deserve to be shared with local people, and South Pole states in its promotional curtain that “the communities living in the Kariba allocation are the homeowners and the main beneficiaries. ” But, as Wentzel described his indoor equestrian centre in Harare and his business interests, Muench wondered how much of the cash spent through corporations on Kariba loans trickled down to other people on the ground.
As Muench investigated Wentzel on how his company worked, Heuberger was taken aback. “If you need him as a businessman in Zimbabwe, you must have a bit of a special character,” he later said. “We have to treat it with a little respect. ” Wentzel told me he didn’t worry about the questions: “I was like, yes, whatever. As long as you stick to the deal. Still, it had no purpose of disclosing its monetary practices. “You’ve got your tactics and your means, and “Not all of them are traceable,” he said. “No one really has any idea what’s going on. Not even the South Pole. I have the key to Pandora’s Box.
As the men savored their appetizers, Heuberger made Wentzel a surprising offer. South Pole would pay about $30 million for only about $8 million in loans. He would also open negotiations for a multibillion-dollar stake in his company, Carbon Green Investments. Wentzel agreed, and the cheerful mood on the terrace. Food and wine were ordered and the celebrations continued by lantern light.
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Muench said that from a business point of view, it had been a “great success”, but he could not avoid a sense of unease about the South Pole paintings in Zimbabwe. “I realized, okay, it’s a huge money-making machine. “”, he told me. Back in Zurich, he kept asking questions. ” I said, ‘Do you know what’s going on with the money?’And then someone said to me, “Dirk, you deserve to take a look at the carbon side of this project, not just the financials, to see how bad it is. “
The perception of carbon as a fungible commodity, like coffee or cotton, emerged in the late 1980s. While humanity was aware of the harms of fossil fuels, an American energy company called Applied Energy Services came up with a new way to reduce emissions: It could simply surround its main coal-fired power plant with a forest, to absorb the carbon escaping from its smokestack.
This plan proved implausible. The scientists calculated that, in order to absorb the carbon that the facility would extract over its lifetime, the company would need to plant about fifty-two million trees, in a densely populated area of Connecticut. Then, an executive named Sheryl Sturges had an inspiration: Since the environment was a global commons, why not locate the forest elsewhere?The company eventually paid 40,000 farmers to plant trees in Guatemala’s mountains. It only charges two million dollars, or a few cents per ton of carbon.
Sturges’ concept caught the world’s attention. ” Antidote to a chimney,” read the headline in Time magazine. A decade later, the concept of carbon offsetting was enshrined in foreign law, when thirty-seven industrialized countries and the European Union agreed to emissions relief. Through the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism, rich countries that struggle to achieve their goals can simply compensate by financing projects in deficient countries.
Growing up in Zurich, Heuberger had been terrified of the environmental calamities that marked the 1980s and 1990s: Chernothroughl, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain. He was an intelligent and susceptible child who spent most of his time alone, riding his motorcycle. in the mountains and memorizing exercise schedules. His anxiety about threats to the planet has “paralyzed” him, he told me. When the Kyoto Agreement was signed, he had just returned from a year of student exchange in Indonesia, where he was “completely overwhelmed. “through the enjoyment of poverty. The prospect of global carbon trading seemed to him a panacea, a way of employing capitalist strategies for radical ends. “The polluter pays, the cleaner wins,” he thought. You can simply take the enemy’s equipment and turn it into a job for a better world. »
Heuberger enrolled to study environmental science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he met like-minded peers — young environmentalists who came together to come up with projects, from stocking the campus with organic coffee to publishing a sustainability magazine. Among them was Muench, who was studying commercial engineering. ” Renat was a bit awkward socially, but also awesome,” he told me. He was like one of those environmental activists, while I was a typical businessman. “
In 2002, as they neared graduation, Heuberger, Muench and a classmate named Patrick Bürgi were invited to a convention on sustainable progress in Costa Rica. While preparing a presentation on carbon trading, Heuberger and Bürgi wanted to make the concept more tangible by asking participants to pay to offset emissions from their flights. They were handed a credit card printer and ambushed delegates after each session: “Did you know you emitted two tons of CO2 when you came to this convention?They raised over ten thousand dollars. ” It was very easy to convince them,” says Bürgi. “And then we started to get nervous, ‘What are we going to do with the money?’
Eventually, they donated the money to the event’s host university to install solar heaters instead of a diesel boiler that powered the gymnasium’s showers, an intervention they estimated stored around seventy tons of carbon per year. “Everything was home-made and improvised,” Bürgi said. “But it was a success. ” Back home, he and Heuberger, along with some friends, registered a nonprofit called MyClimate to continue providing offsets. (Muench, less self-confident in the project, left to pursue a career in investment banking. )A supportive teacher’s workplace, launching a rudimentary online page that allowed other people to calculate their emissions and pay the appropriate penance. Carbon “tickets” were posted and sent to customers, until the company was so successful that the professor complained that it was all over his toner.
When the Kyoto Protocol was ratified in 2005, MyClimate invested in primary climate action projects, adding an initiative to supply pure electricity to around 100 Indian villages; it soon won a contract to offset broadcasts for the FIFA World Cup in Germany. The founders still had a small budget, but when the UN’s carbon trading formula was implemented, they saw new possibilities. In a multibillion-dollar market, “capitalism works very efficiently,” Heuberger said. “The idea that you can just make money is the main driver. “I started a business and started a corporate with 3 other friends, with the maxim of “profit with a purpose”.
The new activity would focus on advancing projects to sell credits through the United Nations system. The name, South Pole, referred to the melting of the Antarctic ice sheets and the Global South, where most of his projects would be based. Heuberger borrowed 20,000 francs from his parents for their share of the business, and the salesmen got a workspace: a disused university chemistry lab, with long rows of sinks and canisters of nitrogen that consumers mistook for sequestered carbon. In the summer they took breaks to swim in the Limmat and in the winter they skied together.
His first breakthrough came easily. China had just announced a five-year plan for renewable energy, and developers of wind, solar and hydropower plants were gathering for the country’s first carbon expo. Heuberger called a friend who spoke Chinese and asked him to meet him in Beijing. They posted business cards with a penguin logo and scheduled meetings with developers in the lobbies of five-star hotels, while they slept in a hostel.
The South Pole’s argument is simple: it would help developers sell carbon-based credits that would have been issued if the electric power they produced came from fossil fuels. The source of income would be small compared to what they earned selling electricity. however, I wouldn’t charge them anything; South Pole would take care of all the complex carbon accounting, in exchange for a commission.
Heuberg’s meetings at the convention resulted in several major projects, in addition to an extensive network of hydropower plants in the mountains of southwestern China. Subsequently, the company grew rapidly. The founders have spread across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, signing many additional projects. Soon, South Pole opened branches in Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia, and India. The employees, known as “penguins,” greeted the new workers with shouts of “Welcome to the iceberg!”
In the years since the Kyoto targets came into force, thousands of projects have been registered under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism and hundreds of millions of credits have been issued, each worth one tonne of carbon. However, as the market grew, they also asked questions about its integrity. Researchers were concerned that developers were exaggerating the climate effect of their projects. Many environmentalists have dismissed the payment as a formula for meaningless indulgences. An online parody invited fake spouses to pay someone else to remain faithful. : “By paying Cheat Neutral, you’re investing in paid projects that promote monogamy. “
At parties in Zurich, the founders of South Pole were asked about the ethics of carbon trading. “We were challenged through friends,” Bürgi told me. But Heuberger shrugged off those concerns. If humanity is to have any chance of being saved, he is convinced, “there has to be a positive narrative about climate action. “When the skeptics disagreed, he told me, their reaction was, “Shut up. Keep it to yourself. ” Because we’re on a project here.
In 2009, South Pole attracted its first major investment, from BP. An executive from the oil company’s select energy division, Justin Adams, served on South Pole’s board of directors and studied Heuberger closely. “Renat is a complex character, who I think is incredibly strategic and considerate about how to give other people a little bit of hope in a time of fear,” he told me. “But I suspect that, like many of us, there are deeper shadows in our own psyche. The qualities of a little emperor and he’s incredibly tough.
The deal with a major oil company didn’t bother Heuberger. ” We can communicate with the most important guys in the world,” he said. As the market has flourished, it has focused on maximizing revenue. ” I need to spin a Ferris wheel,” he told me. With more money, we can have more impact. We can do bigger and bigger things.
One day in 2010, an email from Steve Wentzel, the Zimbabwean tycoon, landed in the inbox of one of South Pole’s founders, a tall, swaggering German named Christian Dannecker. He invited the company to enter new territories.
Wentzel ran a company in Guernsey that promised to “provide monetary freedom through modern offshore monetary services,” as well as a cash-lending business discovered in Mauritius. He had recently acquired a plot of timber from a debtor who had failed to repay a giant loan. The surrounding area is teeming with endangered wildlife, but the land has been devastated by trophy hunting: “If you see a rabbit, it’s a tourist,” Wentzel said. At first he thought the land was of little use. about carbon credits and the idea, “Let’s see if we can get our money back that way. “He discovered the South Pole thanks to Google.
Dannecker was delighted. He had a fondness for trees and had suggested to Heuberger that he consider forestry and carbon projects. “It’s really complicated, but it has to work, because otherwise climate finance probably wouldn’t succeed in those remotest corners of the world,” he said.
Dannecker traveled to Zimbabwe with a team of experts to assess the possibilities. Wentzel’s lands were in the Binga district, south of Lake Kariba, a domain threatened by economic turmoil. Zimbabwe was plagued by hyperinflation: the South Pole team brought home a trillion dollars. bill as a souvenir – and mass unemployment. Subsistence farmers cleared areas of forest to plant crops, graze animals, and collect firewood. Dannecker and Wentzel think they could replace those habits, largely by offering education in sustainable agriculture and then promoting credit. founded on the trees they were protecting. ” It’s the poorest domain in the world I’ve ever been in,” Dannecker said. “That’s where the money goes. “
For cooperation in the region, leaflets with drawings of trees growing in the shape of dollars were distributed. Wentzel convinced local chiefs to allow him to expand the mission to four giant districts, covering two million acres of forest. In return, he promised that seventy percent of his profits from the sale of carbon credits would be invested in Kariba and shared with the people. ” Everyone jumped on the bandwagon,” Wentzel told me.
For Wentzel, forest dwellers would get cash for free. Don’t cut down the trees, that’s all you want to do,” he said. We don’t ask them to get up in the morning, we don’t ask them to get up in the morning, we ask them to do push-ups, we don’t ask the birds to fly backwards. It’s just a positive thing for them.
He set up a company, Carbon Green Investments, to source the proceeds from sales at the South Pole and opened his accounts in the tax haven of Guernsey. “You have to use some conduits,” he told me. At the end of the day, my purpose is to make sure that the task succeeds and that everyone benefits. How do we do this? I’d rather you didn’t ask those questions.
There is no hope of reducing the worst effects of climate change without saving the remaining forests. Earth’s 3 trillion trees account for about one-third of human carbon production, but they continue to be destroyed at an alarming rate, releasing those tents into the atmosphere. Forest offsetting is based on an undeniable principle: if this carbon load can be sold, it is more lucrative to leave the trees than to cut them down.
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However, it’s incredibly complicated to quantify how much carbon those allocations save. To do this, you’ll have to prove that the forest would have been razed without cover, a counterfactual that is unlikely to be proven. There are also “escape” disorders: even if deforesters are driven out of one area, they can cut down trees elsewhere. The question of permanence then arises. Greenhouse gases can persist in the environment for thousands of years, but forests are vulnerable to wildfires and other calamities, and peak cover systems don’t last more than a few decades. Twenty years after Applied Energy Services funded the task of planting trees in Guatemala, researchers found that it had largely failed. (A. E. S. denies this. ) The enormous amount of land and hard work devoted to forestry had led to food shortages and disputes had broken out; Some farmers simply refused to plant the trees. In the end, the researchers calculated, the program had offset only about 10 percent of emissions from Connecticut’s coal plants.
The UN’s carbon formula allowed offsets in categories, but excluded forest carbon projects, due to the specific difficulties of verifying their benefits. Officials had been deliberating on an assessment framework called REDD — “Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries” — to distinguish between cost-effective forest carbon and waste projects. But from the beginning, there has been clinical controversy and considerations about human burden. White developers had begun buying up forest land in the Global South, and there were reports of “carbon cowboys” employing violence and deception to drive indigenous peoples from their territories.
Although the U. N. carbon trading formula never implemented the REDD framework, it took it on through a rival source of accreditation: a Washington, D. C. -based nonprofit, introduced through carbon industry players. The agency, known as Verra, had followed the U. N. ‘s accounting methodologies, promising to apply them with a lighter twist.
Verra allowed developers to choose from several other tactics to calculate the credits their projects would generate. This alarmed critics, who warned that developers would simply decide the style that would allow them to get the maximum credits. The agency’s longtime executive director, an environmental entrepreneur named David Antonioli, posed the challenge but told me, “If you ask for perfection, have a hundred million dollars worth of climate action. If you’re more pragmatic, you might only have two or five billion. “
To sign off on Kariba’s allocation with Verra, South Pole had to calculate how much forest would be lost without any intervention, and thus how much carbon the allocation would retain over a thirty-year lifetime. Credits would be issued annually compared to this total. , and the forecast would be checked once every decade, comparing Kariba to a close, unmonitored reference area. Data analysts at the South Pole first estimated that the program could save about fifty-two million tons of carbon. But Verra asked them to rerun the calculations using one of his approved methodologies. The scientists used one called VM9, which generated a strikingly different task: if the Kariba site was left undefended, deforestation would explode, eventually leading to the loss of ninety-six percent of the forest. On this basis, the assignment could qualify for about two hundred million claims, four times the initial estimate.
Wenzel was delighted. At the time, the value of a single loan was around ten euros, suggesting that it could be reduced by millions. The commission began in 2011, opening a mosaic of netted gardens and beehives on site. ” I’m the one who’s about to get that money back,” he said. Then, with shocking brutality, the carbon market collapsed.
“I’m looking at the value curve in disbelief,” Heuberger told me. “You check at nine o’clock in the morning, at 10 o’clock in the morning, at 11 o’clock in the morning, and every time another five hundred falls. “By the end of 2012, the value of a single loan, which peaked at twenty-five euros, had fallen to thirty-nine cents.
Since the Kyoto Protocol came into force, the market has been dictated by government regulations, which required polluters who could not cover their emissions to buy credits. When the financial crisis led to a slowdown in business activity, demand plummeted.
Investor confidence has been further eroded by a series of scandals. Commercial scams promoting offsets have sprung up across Europe, and hackers have broken into national governments’ carbon registries to siphon off credits. A large-scale fraud, described by French police as the “robbery of the century” had charged the fiscal government five billion euros. After this matter came to light, the Danish government admitted that 80% of the country’s carbon trading companies were fronts for extortion.
Even valid systems had little confidence. The United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism has issued more than $1 billion in carbon credits, three-quarters of which were later deemed environmentally questionable by researchers. Many of the projects were taking place in China, adding the type of renewable energy projects announced across the South Pole. Critics said the plants were too successful to want carbon finance, and the credits they sold gave buyers the right to keep polluting. Even more problematic were cooling plants that intentionally increased greenhouse gas production and then profited. of their capture and destruction.
The biggest blow to the market has been the failure of external climate agreements. The 2009 UN summit in Copenhagen aimed to set new binding limits on emissions, but negotiations failed. Three years later, the first era of commitments under the Kyoto Protocol reached a chaotic point. In the end, almost a fraction of the participants did not meet their objectives and the main players refused to settle for new ones (the United States never ratified the agreement).
“After ten years of believing that governments contribute to a better world, the cork was cut,” Heuberger said. He said that the market needed to be rebuilt, but this time the personal sector had to take the lead. “They’re gone, the governments are gone. We’ll see and we were still there, so we did it ourselves,” he said. “Of course, it wasn’t perfect, but it was the only exhibit in town.
Heuberger summoned his team to a hotel in the city of Krabi on the coast of Thailand, a province of white-sand beaches, mangrove forests and jungle islands. Rather than catering to the desires of consumers suffering to meet government emissions limits, this would serve what is known as the voluntary market, i. e. , corporations seeking to lessen their climate impact, for moral or public relations reasons.
Even with the market in retreat, South Pole planned to keep signing new assignments and accumulating credits. Heuberger was confident that demand would soon recover and that his company would maintain an undisputed dominant position. “They’re all dead,” he said. We’re passing out in a big way here. “As it turned out, it would take years for the market to recover, but Heuberger was right: the absence of a festival would provide an advantage. a contract with the developers, because there were no other buyers,” Hannes Zimmermann, the company’s former head of corporate investments, told me.
As the South Pole became increasingly dominant, some painters felt that the enterprise was deviating from its goal. Of the dozens of current and former painters I spoke to, one quit after being asked to work with a chemical company whose carbon offset proposals appeared to have no climate value. At one point he resigned after expressing fear that South Pole was making exaggerated claims about the benefits of its projects to local communities. Others objected to deals with logging advertising companies, which could simply get credit by leaving the status of tree plantations for a short time. One such project, which South Pole told consumers would “degrade land in rural Mexico through sustainable teak farming,” was carried out through a company that makes more than ninety-seven percent of its profits from logging.
Christoph Sutter, the company’s founding CEO, had written a doctoral thesis on the effect on the evaluation of offset projects before agreeing to share this position with Heuberger. But, during his six years at the helm of the South Pole, he had come to doubt the price of carbon trading, especially the kind of giant renewable energy projects the South Pole was promoting. “I was raising that concern,” he said. It’s just paper credits. “He told me that he was still a friend of Heuberger’s, but that he did not share his religion in general. “The vast majority of what you see in the market, in my opinion, comes down to a lot of greenwashing, a lot of marketing, a lot of money,” he said. Heuberger had little patience for this kind of negativity. “Investors can sense it if the temperament is rarely very good,” he said. Sutter quietly resigned in 2012.
In the midst of the crisis, Wentzel became disillusioned. His source of income from the sale of credits had plummeted, and yet, according to his calculations, it costs him about $60,000 a month to pay for the staff and projects of his project – Network Gardens. , beehives, wells, chimney protection. ” I ended up in a pretty big hole,” he told me.
Locals barely lined up to thank him. In 2014, a network leader named Elmon Mudenda went to an Transparency International workshop in Harare and warned that Kariba’s assignment was a scam. “We haven’t noticed anything tangible,” he said, according to the Zimbabwe Herald.
The following year, two Zimbabwean researchers visited the area to interview locals and published a damning study titled “Carbon Struggles in the Zambezi Valley. “They reported that proponents of the allocation believed that “community resources, plus forests and wildlife, should be used for consumption. “District councils, according to the study, were “like sponsors, with very little knowledge of the goal of the task and no voice in its direction. “
As the tension in the network increased, Wentzel lost patience. One Saturday, he called South Pole and threatened to shut down the entire business. “Carbon is nonsense,” Dannecker said. Wentzel demanded $1 million until Monday to keep the task alive. Heuberger at a friend’s wedding house in Italy when he heard the news. “We made the quick decision to send the money,” he told me. “Of course, we’re looking for anything in return for that money. So we just took some credits.
In fact, South Pole bought 3 million credits, at a modest value of fifty cents each; He bought about the same amount the following year. Typically, the company made money by acting as a middleman, promoting credits on behalf of developers, and charging a commission. Now, he would buy the credits outright, which meant he would keep all the credits. benefits once sold. Wentzel told me that after receiving the funds, he drove through the Kariba site, paying his obligations with wads of bills. ” A hundred thousand dollars is as big as a brick,” he said. It’s hard to get along with. “
The intervention revived the project. Mudenda, the leader of the network who had previously criticized Kariba, has now promoted his beekeeping efforts in a local newspaper; The villagers earned $400 from harvesting organic honey. In 2016, Dannecker flew to Zimbabwe and blogged about his layover in “Why I Get Out of Bed Every Morning. “The domain experienced a drought, but the project’s wells provided water and agricultural efforts produced food. “Sometimes the company looks like what it is: a company,” he writes. “But it’s so much more: our company has a purpose. “
However, the company’s operations in Zimbabwe were on shaky ground. Project observers had surveyed the site and discovered fewer trees than the South Pole had planned to claim. Dannecker then discovered something even more alarming: the rate of forest loss in the project’s target region. the benchmark against which their good luck would be measured, particularly lower than expected. The wave of deforestation that the South Pole’s efforts were intended to salvage more like a deforestation network, which could particularly decrease the cost of the project.
Dannecker didn’t do anything rash. ” There was no urgency, for two reasons,” he told me. First of all, the South Pole was still years away from being able to compare its style with reality. Second, in the midst of the market crisis, “there wasn’t any damn request anyway” for credits from Kariba. But that was about to change.
On a Friday in August 2018, a small figure dressed in a yellow trench coat walked up to the Swedish Parliament in Stockholm and sat at the foot of the building. Next to it is a sign painted in capital letters: “SKOLSTREJK FÖR KLIMATET”.
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Greta Thunberg’s “school strike” represented something rare in an era of futility: an individual act that resonated around the world. The motion she inspired, in which millions of young people skipped school to call for climate action, resulted in the largest environmental protests in history. To Heuberger, a former youth activist, the fifteen-year-old Swede seemed like a kindred spirit. “Greta Thunberg and the climate strike were of paramount importance,” he said at the time. “Today, no indexed company can be left out when it comes to weather protection. “
The strike, which took place amid wildfires and increasingly apocalyptic weather, has put new pressure on the world’s largest companies. Business at the South Pole has skyrocketed. ” Becoming carbon neutral is the latest luxury trend,” the company proclaimed, after Gucci announced it. it would use credits from the South Pole to cancel broadcasts from its home chain. Nestlé was quick to claim that Kit Kats and Nespresso pods would be carbon neutral. Porsche trusts its consumers that the emissions of ten thousand miles from a Cayenne can be cleaned up for as little as sixty-seven dollars. “Climate action wants to move away from this idea that it’s just absolutely green people, the kind of people who wear hemp shirts and walk everywhere,” Heuberger said in an interview promoting the project.
Even after Thunberg denounced the compensation as “a harmful climate lie,” her action boosted the market. JetBlue has announced that it will use South Pole credits to help offset emissions from its U. S. flights. Delta followed up with a $1 billion pledge. Many other corporations have used South Pole offsets for their net neutrality claims.
Although South Pole has a portfolio of more than a thousand projects, its partnership with Wentzel has proven singularly lucrative, not least because of the loans it had acquired directly during the crisis, at fifty cents each. There was no additional investment in the project, but the margins for the South Pole were huge. Kariba’s credits would eventually be worth more than fifteen dollars.
Heuberger liked to say that business is like surfing: you wait for the wave to come and then ride it to the end. South Pole has embarked on a primary expansion, developing up to 1,200 employees and 29 overseas offices. To celebrate the opening of its New York branch, it announced that it had neutralized carbon emissions for the entire city for an hour. The company repeated the 2019 Climate Week operation, but this time it claimed that, for a second, it had neutralized the world’s emissions.
The carbon market has increased sevenfold since the strike, to $2 billion a year; However, this figure is still lower than global sales of nail clippers, fireworks or pepper spray. In September 2020, a new initiative emerged that promised to radically expand trade.
The Task Force on Scaling Up Voluntary Carbon Markets was a business driving force led by Mark Carney, former head of the Bank of England. It had about 400 members, including many of the world’s largest fossil fuel suppliers. demand; Its net-zero commitments required the cancellation of billions of tons of carbon each year, far more than the global source of offsets. Carbon credits were typically sold through a single developer to a single buyer, with the help of a middleman like South Pole. Carney’s vision was to successfully create a stock market for offsets, so that they could be traded with the same speed and ease as any other monetary instrument.
According to the logic of the markets, such exchanges would help to facilitate the financing of environmental projects. In practice, it diverted the budget to speculators. BP and Shell had opened carbon trading offices, as had the Saudi government. Gilles Dufrasne, of the non-profit Carbon Market Watch, observed that credits can simply be exchanged over and over again before being used to offset emissions: “When you buy a carbon credit, how lucky are you that somewhere in the price chain it belonged to Shell?And that component of what you’re paying for is the reduction that they’ve received?
When the task force held a promotional occasion at a U. N. weather summit in Glasgow, Thunberg and other protesters were filmed outside, shouting, “You can shove the climate crisis up your ass. “Later, he tweeted an addendum: “I have to reduce swear words and swear words to zero. On the occasion when I have to say something inappropriate, I promise to make up for it by saying something nice. “
Despite the controversy, South Pole was quick to capitalize on the lawsuit. TotalEnergies said it had delivered its first shipment of “carbon-neutral liquefied herbal fuel” thanks to Kariba’s credits, and Dutch supplier Greenchoice bought millions more to market its fuel as “sustainable”. The South Pole’s willingness to do business with energy giants has irked its workforce. The staff was largely young and idealistic, and many believed the company was helping the world’s worst polluters improve their image. Heuberger defended this decision: “Why? Wouldn’t those guys who are making billions of dollars in profits invest some of that money in weather financing?”
The head of South Pole’s consulting division, Rebecca Self, suggested that the company awarded “climate neutrality” badges to consumers who gave the impression of making few significant efforts to reduce their emissions. But, she told me, when she raised those objections, Heuberger accused her of “looking like an NGO” and “trying to kill projects. “(Heuberger maintains that he doesn’t recall saying this, but in our conversations he has continually condemned environmental nonprofits, complaining about their “destructive and widespread attack” on the carbon market and even suggesting that those organizations are secretly agents of chaos funded through the oil industry. . . ) Soon after, Self learned that the South Pole helped the Qatar World Cup justify a carbon-neutrality claim that excluded maximum emissions from the structure of seven air-conditioned stadiums. He put his considerations in writing and resigned.
The expansion of the South Pole continued unhindered, and the company acquired five smaller competitors. The founders began selling their own shares to wealthy investors, adding the Singapore government, the Liechtenstein royal family, and Salesforce. A deal with Swisscom secured the $1 billion valuation, although Heuberger told me he had come to regret the prestige it conferred on him. As long as we were a startup, we were everybody’s darlings,” he said. People think that if you’re a unicorn, you’ll have to have made a lot of money and ripped everyone off. “Still, he feared he would be overtaken by a fast-growing competitor. “We have to protect our market share,” he says. Overtaking is for the losers, because everyone triples. “
When Dirk Muench went to see paintings at the South Pole in May 2021, it was like going back to his roots. In his early days on Wall Street, he told me he was fascinated by “prestige and greatness,” but he had come to regard everything as “smoke and mirrors. “He had dropped out of JPMorgan, studied meteorological science at Columbia, and eventually contacted his former roommate Patrick Bürgi. projects,” Muench said.
Hired as head of corporate investments, he joined his college friends at the Technopark, a massive studio complex in Zurich that housed the first South Pole office. The company now occupied a much larger area there, but the founders still swam together in the river. “Everything felt good,” Muench told me.
Gradually, however, he realized that the South Pole was much less concerned than he thought about the commissions he presented as his own. “They’ve created this symbol of a commission developer protecting the climate,” he said. “They’re none of those things. He’s a runner. It’s hard to recognize Heuberger as the radical environmentalist I’d admired in college. “I started to see that he lost,” Muench told me. If you work in such a lucrative and smart company, and you’ve earned your power, your status, and your cash, you’re doing everything you can to protect it. »
When Muench traveled to Zimbabwe to save the Kariba project, he came back even more worried. When asked to conduct due diligence on the investment South Pole planned to make in Wentzel’s business, he pulled the extracts from the invoices to Kariba and found that all the cash. . . around $40 million – had been transferred to a single account in Guernsey. He told Wentzel that he needed proof of where the budget for that account was going. But after six months of emails and phone calls and a few other meetings in Zimbabwe, Wentzel remained evasive. South Pole had virtually no idea what had happened to the tens of millions of dollars its consumers had supposedly spent to offset their carbon emissions.
Documents released about the divestment detailed what would have happened to this money: Wentzel’s company would keep 30 percent of it, and the rest would be used to pay district councils, fund divestment activities, and supplement a hard-time fund. Obviously, some of this money was spent in Kariba. In addition to agricultural activities, new schools and clinics, anti-poaching patrols, and firefighting measures were implemented. But, Muench said, when Wentzel, despite everything, sent a spreadsheet of his expenses, in the summer of 2022, it was only about six million euros. Even that, he told me, “I had no support, nothing. “
On July 9, Muench sent an email to Heuberger and other leaders, with the title “Red Flag. “He said that after a lengthy investigation, he could only conclude that the maximum budget allocated to Kariba’s mission had been In private, he says, he suggested to Heuberger that he admit his problems: “We want to make it public before it appears in the press. “Heuberger was unwilling to pay attention to Muench. Impact,” Heuberger told me. For him there is only intelligence and evil. “South Pole excluded Muench from the investigation into Wentzel’s finances, after which “dating and data flow turned out to be more productive,” the company claimed. . For Heuberger, Kariba’s assignment was what it was meant to be: “Is it perfect?Is the guy 100 percent? Is every dollar 100 percent?He shrugged. You have to orient yourself. “
In September, Wentzel flew to London on business and I met him for breakfast at a bistro in Sloane Square. He was wearing designer chinos, Chelsea boots, and an impeccable white shirt, but when he greeted me, I saw that he was missing a front tooth. .
In two previous meetings, I spent hours asking Wentzel about the project’s finances. At first, he recited conflicting numbers, pulled out a calculator and pressed the keys before giving up and pushing it away. In the end, he admitted that his inability to account for cash is no coincidence. “There’s no documentary trail,” he told me.
Years of political and economic instability have made banking in Zimbabwe too precarious, he said, and moving cash from Guernsey to a sanctioned state a bureaucratic headache: “Do you know how obedient I had to be to make a single transaction?”So he came up with an untraceable way to move the funds. “It’s illegal,” he acknowledged, “but it was investigated. “
When he needed cash for the task, he says, he would move it from Guernsey to the account of an acquaintance looking for electronic funds, to “Mauritius, the Cayman Islands, the Seychelles, Russia or wherever,” and at other times, he would pay a bill for something else — for a shipment of motorcycles, for example — and that user would hand him the money. Same amount in cash.
“It looks bad, because you’re sending cash here, there, and everywhere, but on the recipient’s side I can show where it was delivered to us,” he told me. “Well, I can show you the wads of bills in “When the bills came in, he said, he would pick up the money and use it,” dividing it among those interested in the bill. “For any European or American, this is not comprehensible,” he said. How many Westerners contribute part of a million dollars in cash?
Wentzel’s demeanor became transparent as he unloaded and began to prepare a mock interrogation. ‘Can I see SWIFT?'” he exploded, referring to the code banks use for overseas payments. The cash arrived here quickly, but I can’t tell you what SWIFT was. Suddenly, his crazy smile gave way to a frown. “”I’m going on to say about it, and I hope that’s not all, because I’ll probably go to prison,” he said. Then he calmed down. ” I will go to prison for the right reasons,” he said. Savior or villain? I’m right in the middle, and I’m glad to be.
The Castello di Modanella is a 12th-century castle whose battlements rise into the Tuscan hills. It claims to have harbored at least two popes, and Galileo was banished to its tower after being found guilty of heresy. Its stone halls are now used primarily for gala dinners and, in recent years, executive retreats at the South Pole.
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On a warm September afternoon in 2022, while workers were partying in the gardens, a circle of tired executives, including Heuberger, Dannecker and Muench, stood in a courtyard. They were expecting bad news.
Last year marked a decade since Kariba’s launch, which meant that the South Pole had to be asked through Verra to see that its explosive predictions were at odds with reality. After months of reviewing satellite imagery, the company’s knowledge analysts decided that deforestation in the domain control was particularly lower than expected. They estimated that only fifteen million of the forty-two million carbon credits generated through the allocation had actually been supported and avoided emissions. All the other tons of carbon that were intended to be offset just weren’t real.
Muench and another executive suggested to Heuberger that he immediately prevent the promotion of compensation from the Kariba project. “If it turns out that we knowingly sold credits that don’t equate to a ton of avoided CO2 emissions, that would cause enormous damage,” Muench said. Heuberger rejected this idea. The credits were validated through Verra, he argued: “If you want to evolve, you have to rely on certain regulations and systems. (South Pole acknowledges that this verbal exchange took place but says it took place after Tuscany. )In Zurich, South Pole continued to promote Kariba enthusiastically. In the months following the miscalculation, the company sold more than 3 million eco-value credits to Porsche, Nestlé and Nando’s, among others, adding the Cannes Film Festival and a network. of Australian zoos.
But market surveillance has increased. Investigations conducted through The Guardian, Bloomberg and others have exposed questionable accounting and network abuses through carbon projects. Greenpeace and other nonprofits have published reports denouncing the industry as a harmful distraction from genuine fossil fuel reliance efforts.
On a Friday night in November, a forest ecology expert named Elias Ayrey posted a satellite image of the Kariba region on the Internet. “I feel upset,” he wrote. I just saw an assignment from #carbono that will probably get you more than 30 times more money than you deserve. Ayrey, who works for an independent scoring company called Renoster, had used symbology from NASA satellites to calculate deforestation in the Kariba reference region. It was particularly lower than what the company had reported. He concluded with a caveat: “All reviews are my own. And my view is that everyone involved in this task deserves to be arrested. “
Late at night, Heuberger posted a caustic response: “You don’t seem to understand how carbon finance works, and your only goal is to criticize and spread fake news. His phone soon started vibrating with calls from alarmed customers, and 4 days later, the company finally asked its employees to suspend the sale of Kariba credits. By that time, South Pole had waived twenty-three million credits for the project, eight million more than it could justify.
The atmosphere around the Technopark was tense. One autumn day, Muench sat next to Heuberger in the open office and said he was still worried about Kariba. “You sold credits that weren’t real,” he said. They didn’t have the effect you expected over time, and you took a lot of money with you. “
Heuberger, furious, told me: “He came here and told me: ‘Renat, they gave you a fortune’. I ask you to rectify all these omissions in a transparent way. Talk to your investors and clients and give them their money back. . ‘ “
Muench said Heuberger yelled at him, “Get out!He then followed his old friend down the street and convinced him not to leave.
In December, South Pole held an all-around meeting to allay staff concerns about Kariba, to “build buy-in around this truly amazing project,” as one executive put it. (A recording of the consultation was shared with me through Follow the Money, an investigative newsroom in the Netherlands. ) Christian Dannecker began his presentation with an intricate investigation of deforestation curves, counterfactual models, and the limitations of NASA’s satellite knowledge for assessing dryland deforestation. Then he answered the questions.
“Are Kariba’s credits based on reality?” one member asked.
“I ask myself again: what is reality?” said Dannecker.
South Pole’s U. S. sales manager tried again: “We have consumers come to us and say, ‘Hey, the credits you sold us have an effect on what we claim. Did this really happen? Yes or no?'”
A public affairs official chimed in: “That’s why we’re doing the audit right now, because we have to make sure that’s the case. “
“How much benefit did the South Pole get from promoting Kariba’s credits?” another member asked.
“To be honest, I didn’t do the numbers,” Dannecker replied. “I guess we probably made ten million dollars. ” There were audible gasps, before the leader warned, “To be clear, we don’t need to repeat this publicly. “»
Muench watched the assembly in disbelief. It’s Machiavellian,” he said. “I think in the end they started lying to each other. ” He left the company three days later, after filing a report through the whistleblowing channel. He got a brief reaction a few weeks later. ” An investigation has been carried out and we have come to the conclusion that the South Pole was made according to the methodology approved by Verra,” it reads. “So we’re going to close this case. ” That month, Verra qualified another seven million credits for the Kariba project.
In the absence of a government regulator, Verra had the main regulatory framework for voluntary carbon trading. The company controlled about two-thirds of the market, and almost part of its projects were forest carbon projects such as Kariba. , the scenes inside his headquarters were chaotic. ” One day we were tossing and turning and the next day we were drinking from a chimney hose,” Andrew Beauchamp, who worked at Verra for 8 years, told me. CEO David Antonioli, a lanky guy with an elastic grin, said developers are making more and more effort to get their apps adopted. “They were pretty,” he said.
For years, Verra had delegated oversight of the assignment to external environmental auditors. (Kariba’s assignment has been revised five times, which Heuberger has cited as evidence of careful supervision. )But the auditors were hired and paid through the promoters of the assignment, potentially boosting considerations. “A lot of us think this looks like an elaborate fraud,” Danny Cullenward, a weather economist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Verra allowed credit distributors to claim that they had gone through a physically powerful certification process, “although each and every detail of that process, when you dig deeper, is carried out through financially interested parties. “
Many observers felt that Verra was facing an even more serious conflict: he was collecting a payment to certify the credit. “The more credits they issue, the more money they make,” said Niklas Kaskeala, founder of Compensate, a Finnish nonprofit focused on carbon market integrity. “It’s structural corruption,” he told me. (Verra has recently begun more in-depth oversight of auditors and is applying to review its forest carbon procedures, though only after verifying more than a billion credits. )
Last January, The Guardian published an article claiming, based on three clinical studies, that more than 90% of the forest credits rated through Verra were “useless”. Although Antonioli resigned soon after, Verra disputed the report, arguing that most of the forests across its systems are still standing, despite publicity pressures to reduce them. Since then, several independent agencies and educational studies have agreed that most existing forest carbon projects sell offsets based on grossly exaggerated claims. According to those calculations, several hundred million tons of carbon that is intended to be offset will remain in the environment for centuries.
At the beginning of 2023, South Pole was suffering damage to its reputation. He invited his clients to make a stopover at the Kariba site and Dannecker published a blog post describing the task as a great success. Then, in January, a tape of the staff meeting on the task was leaked to Follow the Money. The resulting article was titled, “Demonstration Project Through World’s Largest Carbon Trader Actually Resulted in More Carbon Emissions. “
South Pole responded with a lengthy rebuttal, complaining of “exaggerated and misleading reports. “Still, his own claims about his earnings were confusing. Dannecker had written on his previous blog that the company charged a twenty-five percent commission on sales in Kariba. credits and sent the remaining €40 million to Wentzel for distribution. He now claimed that the company had made much higher margins on loans it had acquired directly, claiming that Wentzel had earned fifty-seven million euros, out of a total turnover of more than one hundred million.
At the South Pole, Kariba mission control has caused consternation and several staff members have resigned. The public is also wary of the voluntary market. Consumer teams have begun suing companies for “greenwashing” and the European Parliament has proposed banning the networks. claims of neutrality based solely on offsetting, after determining that 40% of green marketing in the EU was “completely unfounded”. Gucci has quietly abandoned its claim to carbon neutrality. Volkswagen, Barclays, L’Oreal and McKinsey said they would block the purchase of compensation. When the value of carbon credits plummeted, Heuberger was dismayed. “Now it’s a loose weapon: turn, turn, turn,” he said. We want to avoid feeding. “
A few weeks after the main points of the hand-raising were revealed, Muench received an email from South Pole’s lawyers, it wasn’t easy for him to show up for wondering about the leak of the tape. He denied being behind the leak, but the investigation seemed like an opportunity to raise considerations about Kariba. He agreed to meet with the lawyers and sent them detailed written testimony beforehand. The lawyers canceled the meeting.
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Muench said he hadn’t heard anything else about the fees that were opposed to him. But when I met with Heuberger this summer, he told me that the controversy over Kariba had been concocted through his former friend. “It’s very psychological,” he says. To his frustration, we were more successful than he was. And in his mind, this story was created: the only explanation for why South Pole is a success is because it’s a weird company. It’s a bit suspicious. We cheat. (I first spoke to Muench after Heuberger discussed the considerations he had raised, but he declined to speak publicly. Regardless, he agreed to do so only after Heuberger continued to criticize him. )
South Pole insists that all Kariba credits sold will in the end be backed by true emissions reductions: Verra’s method allows it to reimburse excess emissions with offsets generated in the future. But several experts, adding resources in Verra, told me that this would possibly not be possible, as the decrease in deforestation in the reference region would seriously restrict the project’s eligibility for new credits.
Justin Adams, the former BP executive who had served on South Pole’s board, told me, after first hearing about the controversy, that he thought the company was being unfairly maligned. “You got all the calls about Kariba, right? No, not yet. Have you been a transparent positive force in a world that’s been filled with darkness lately? Of course you have,” he said. However, as he learned more, he began to lose all sympathy. “As a billion-euro corporation (a mythical unicorn), SP deserves to have had much greater auditing mechanisms,” he wrote to me. “Sure, they took a lot of risks in the beginning, but the rewards in later years seem disproportionate. More comparable to an oil and fuel lease than an environmental and grid progression project.
Local citizens believe that the effect of the task has been minimal. Iain Foulds, a white farmer from Zimbabwe who has become an outspoken critic of Kariba, told me: “This has nothing to do with the environment or saving our flora and fauna. It was a question of coins. Yes, there are quite a few small coins filtering in here and there for your little tasks. But where do the big coins go?However, network leaders fear squandering the benefits they receive. In June, he spoke with Elmon Mudfinisha, who participated in a video call from a dimly lit room, with cracked plaster and peeling paint. His great concern was that they would abandon the assignment. At the end of the day, it’s the network that suffers. Not one more,” he told me.
The following month, Follow the Money published another article. Journalists visited the mission site and were shown a number of abandoned orchards. The lead author, Ties Gijzel, told me that he and his associates had also heard that Wentzel was involved in trophy hunting.
Big game hunting is legal in Zimbabwe, but the South Pole has touted the allocation of Kariba as a wildlife refuge, protecting “many endangered species, such as the African elephant, lion and hippopotamus. “When I interviewed Wentzel, he claimed that trophy hunting was taking over positioning the allocation area. He himself had taken control of the game in one region, granting the rights to an operator named Dalton.
Over the summer, the Zimbabwean government announced plans to centralize control of auto bond trading projects within its borders and capture thirty percent of the long-term profits. Wentzel told me that he didn’t pay much attention to what was happening in Kariba. “It’s not the skin on my nose,” he said. He was already making plans for a new venture, which he referred to as “Kariba on steroids. “In her project, local women can be hired to sew car mats for Porsche or sew beads on Gucci accessories, she confessed that none of the logos had accepted the initiative. He was “struggling to find something for Nespresso,” he said, but was negotiating a deal to sell driftwood lampshades to a U. S. furniture catalog. It has already registered the new corporate in Ireland, under the so-called Fair Share.
Sylvera, the eldest of a small organization of rating agencies seeking transparency in the carbon market, occupies an office full of plants in a modest building in London. When I visited last June, I was greeted by General Guyager, Allister Furey, a round-cheeked guy dressed in shoes and a vaguely psychedelic T-shirt.
Furey, a neurobiologist with a Ph. D. in device learning, worked for a decade in renewable energy before focusing on carbon removal. To limit global warming to 1. 5 degrees, according to the UN, humanity will have to find a way to absorb about ten gigatons of carbon from the environment. every year. ” The scale of the challenge is so extreme,” Furey told me. “Billions of dollars have to be moved. ” Carbon offsetting seemed like a viable source of this type of funding, which is why Sylvera was founded in 2020 to boost investment by separating smart credits from waste. Since then, space-based radars and satellite imagery have estimated that about 80% of the forest carbon projects it has evaluated are likely to be overcredited. “People get paid more to factor more credits without going to jail, so there’s a very strong incentive,” Furey said.
Recently, two new projects have emerged to inspire higher standards. The Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity Initiative, introduced with the UK government, has set rules to discourage corporations from making empty claims about the benefits of offsetting. The Voluntary Carbon Market Integrity Council, the successor to Mark Carney’s task force, has announced a set of “carbon foundations” to assess the quality of existing programs. “If you build integrity, the ladder will follow,” Annette Nazareth, chair of the board, told me. Research through carbon knowledge firm Trove Research found that 95% of projects on the market would not meet those new standards.
However, offsetting remains at the heart of global plans to achieve net zero. The Paris Agreement, signed in 2016, provided for a new framework for carbon trading, the main points of which are still being discussed seven years later. More than two-thirds of participating countries plan to use offsets to meet their targets, and an alliance of governments and industry figures is pushing for forestry projects to be included in the new system.
Experts have told me that they are concerned that the very registries they accused of being guilty of catastrophic mismanagement of the voluntary market will, for the sake of convenience, end up playing a central role in the UN process. Axel Michaelowa, a researcher at the University of Zurich and co-author of several U. N. weather reports, said Verra told officials that if they used his verification services, “they would have a one-stop shop, they wouldn’t have to pay a single penny. “, “would mean, of course, that all the shortcomings of those personal systems would contaminate the compliance market. “
This November, when world leaders gather in Dubai for the annual United Nations climate summit, they will try to reach 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 a director of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
One afternoon in July I met Heuberger at the Technopark. The sky over the city was cobalt blue and the air incredibly clean. We strolled along the Limmat, past city workers taking off their suits to dive into the water, then climbing a ramshackle staircase leading to their home, an inconspicuous cream-colored structure perched on a hillside above the river. When I noticed his modesty, he nodded. ” It wasn’t cheap, but it’s a far cry from the villas you can see,” he said. he said, pointing to the mansions on the most sensitive part of the hill. Heuberger also has a pied-à-terre near Davos, but insisted that the lure of business has never been money. He saw building his business as a kind of game: “Of course, we’re all motivated to win. “
At the moment, Heuberger was winning his latest war: what he called the “shit storm” in the carbon market. He blamed a handful of enemies: Muench, environmentalists, oil corporations investing in secret plots to destroy those who seek to put a value on carbon. As he listed those drawbacks, he clapped his hands in the air, as if he wanted to swat mosquitoes. “We are stubborn and messy people,” he said. “You can slap us as many times as you want. We will come back. » In recent weeks, Heuberger has worked to “change the narrative. ” He had revealed plans to collaborate with Mitsubishi on carbon removal projects and traveled to London for Climate Week, where he joined a panel on how to prevent misinformation about offsetting. Although his company has spent years awarding customers badges proclaiming them “carbon neutral,” Heuberger dismissed the designation as a “simple slogan. ” The times demand a new approach, he stated: “We will have to become physically powerful and honest. » To this end, the South Pole introduced a new insignia. Its penguin logo would now be surrounded by the words “This corporate budget climate action. ” The announcement was met with cautious applause.
At his home, Heuberger led me across a lawn covered in lavender and brambles, to a sparsely furnished living room, where a baby play mat was the only splash of color. He has 4 daughters with his wife, Zani, whom he met in Indonesia. while looking for projects for the Polo, Sur. Su youngest son was born last year. When talking to her daughters about climate change, she says, she focused exclusively on messages of empowerment and optimism: “In our house there is no climate anxiety. “
On a terrace with striking views of the city, Zani grills sausages, halloumi and tempeh skewers. After dinner, Heuberger sat down drinking wine, his feet bent beneath him, and became a little maudlin as he gazed at the darkening horizon. “We ate dry bread for many years, satisfied that we had survived,” he said. “I look like an old man now. But I look at those little kids coming with their super transparent blockchain-based solution and say it’s all been crap, which is what we’ve done. IT IS OK. Calculate Kariba credits. Good luck. It’s not that easy. ” In my previous conversations with Heuberger, he had avoided any perceived insults or criticism, but as we continued to talk, those defenses seemed to fail. He confessed that it had been difficult to stay positive. When you think you did the right thing, everything goes and someone says you had bad intentions, that’s what hurts the most,” Array said. “You have to build a thick wall between you and your true feelings, which of course are depressing. “
He told me that he spends a lot of time riding his motorcycle these days, on the same beat-up Titan road bike he bought with his accumulated money as a child. “I had my convictions, my convictions and my motorcycle,” he recalls fondly. “I was in my own world. ” To encourage himself, he also began playing the cello (another activity of his formative years) and began taking singing lessons. “Except me, everyone in the elegance is little kids,” he said. In a few weeks, he was to appear in an amateur opera, a production of “Hansel and Gretel. “Heuberger had been cast as the young men’s father – “the bad boy, the weird guy” – who triumphantly returns from a lucrative day at the market to find that his children have been left alone in the woods. “He doesn’t realize it,” Heuberger said. He thinks he’s doing something smart, but he doesn’t perceive anything. ♦
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