“I don’t know anything,” he said. “I’m not a tree scientist or anything like that.”) Wentzel, a trim, chiselled man with a buzz cut silvering at the sides, was a former show jumper who had made a fortune in offshore finance and then started investing in gold mines. On safari, he confided that he had no expertise in forest preservation he had tried out carbon offsetting on a whim, when he was given a parcel of land as payment for a debt. They flew to Harare and took a chartered plane to the safari camp to conduct the negotiations in style. To insure Wentzel’s loyalty, Muench urged Heuberger to buy a stake in his business. The entire agreement rested on a perfunctory contract that the developer, a white Zimbabwean tycoon named Steve Wentzel, could break anytime. When Muench heard the details, he was astonished that South Pole had done so little to secure its most important project. He was a self-confessed stickler, and could be too fastidious for Heuberger’s taste-but he was a skilled dealmaker. Muench had left Wall Street to support climate action in the world’s poorest places. To help devise a response, Heuberger turned to an old friend from college, Dirk Muench, who had recently joined South Pole. Now a competitor had offered the developer a substantial payment to take over the project. By the terms of the Kariba deal, the company purchased carbon credits from a developer who oversaw the area’s forestland, and sold them for a twenty-five-per-cent commission. That year, South Pole was approaching a billion-dollar valuation, which would make it the world’s first “carbon unicorn.”īut alarming news had reached the company’s headquarters, in Zurich: it was at risk of losing its most lucrative project. As brands scrambled for inexpensive ways to reduce emissions, the market for offsets surged, quadrupling in 2021 alone. This perspective was enthusiastically received: Heuberger had regular speaking engagements at Davos and a spot in the World Economic Forum’s network of experts. “In fact, it’s the opposite”-drivers should enjoy their vehicles, knowing that “every ton of CO 2 they compensate for is backed by a verified emission reduction.” “It’s not true that to save the climate we will all need to go into perpetual lockdown or stop having fun,” he said, promoting Porsche’s offsetting program. But, as he built his company, he had developed a consumer-friendly brand of climate optimism. “We’re here to save the climate,” he told me.Īs a child, Heuberger spent his spare time gluing protest flyers to car windows, and he considered himself an activist. Heuberger, a kinetic, grandiloquent man, speaks expansively about his mission. South Pole thus pioneered a model of carbon offsetting that has been counted among our best hopes for staving off climate catastrophe: a mechanism that diverts funds from polluters in wealthy countries to protect crucial ecosystems in the Global South. Leading corporations, including Volkswagen, Gucci, Nestlé, Porsche, and Delta Air Lines, paid South Pole nearly a hundred million dollars for Kariba credits, allowing them to market goods or services as “carbon neutral.” The Kariba project, spanning an area ten times the size of New York City, was among the world’s first “avoided deforestation” programs by deterring local people from chopping down trees, it promised to prevent the release of tens of millions of tons of greenhouse gas. A decade earlier, South Pole had signed a deal to sell carbon offsets from an effort to protect a vast swath of forest on the banks of Lake Kariba, upriver from the camp.
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