“Avoiding tropical deforestation - or REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) in the parlance of the emerging policy dynamic - is the most mind twistingly complex endeavor in the carbon game. The fact is that REDD involves scientific uncertainties, technical challenges, heterogeneous non-contiguous asset classes, multi-decade performance guarantees, local land tenure issues, brutal potential for gaming and the fact that getting it wrong means that scam artists will get unimaginably rich while emissions don’t change a bit. You can understand why back in 1997 in Kyoto everybody threw their hands up and just decided this was too hard to try.”

“There’s no way we can supply by ourselves the volume of offsets that are required by Qantas, Origin, etc. What we do need is for these companies to get their heads out of the sand, stop overestimating carbon and actually start using the real data, and provide the marketplace, including the investors, with the truth,” Ready said.”

“Point Carbon, a market analysis group part-owned by financial and industrial interests.”

“Dan Welch, a Manchester journalist who investigated offsetters for Ethical Consumer magazine, summarised it neatly: “Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.”