David Antonioli, CEO of the climate-action nonprofit group Verra, has announced that he will be stepping down from his position in J...
David Antonioli, CEO of the climate-action nonprofit group Verra, has announced that he will be stepping down from his position in June – though he plans to stay on board with the company in a reduced senior advisory role.
Antonioli will be replaced by the organization’s current president, Judith Simon, the reason being that a recent investigation exposed Verra and its operations as fraudulent. It turns out that about 90 percent of Verra’s so-called “carbon credits” are worthless, providing no measurable impact on, or benefit to the environment.
In his resignation announcement on LinkedIn, Antonioli failed to mention this important little detail, instead focusing on the alleged “positives” of his involvement with the company.
“I am immensely proud of what Verra has accomplished and of the incredible team that has made it the world’s leading standard-setter for climate action and sustainable development,” Antonioli wrote in a post.
Everything related to climate change, carbon credits, and the like is a SCAM
It turns out that Antonioli’s work at Verra was useless and scam-ridden, providing virtually nothing in the way of actual carbon reductions. The “phantom credits” he and his company provide are nothing but a money-making scam, in essence.
Said carbon credits are purchased by the likes of Disney, Shell, and Gucci to help improve their ESG (environment, social, and governance) scores, funneling money into Antonioli’s bank account. Now, Simon’s bank account will be getting the cream of the crop instead, while Antonioli will occupy a quieter role at the company.
The Guardian, in conjunction with the German newspaper Die Zeit, conducted the investigation that exposed Verra’s work as fraudulent. The two media outlets discovered that only a small fraction of Verra’s rainforest projects have done anything to help stop deforestation around the world, deforestation being one of the things that climate fanatics claim is causing “global warming.”
The investigation further round that the alleged “threats” to the world’s rainforest cited by Verra as requiring carbon credits to offset were overestimated by about 400 percent – this according to a 2022 study out of the University of Cambridge.
Not only that, but many of the projects initiated by Verra were, and still are, riddled with “human rights” abuses, including forced evictions and the destruction of private homes and property.
In response to the investigative report that was produced by The Guardian and Die Zeit, Verra claimed that it is “misleading because it failed to acknowledge the inconsistencies between the three studies that it draws one, presenting instead a distorted picture of consensus.”
“Verra’s experts found, for example, that of the 12 projects in Brazil assessed by both groups, one Thales West et al., the study concluded that deforestation or degradation was reduced in 33 percent of projects, while the Cambridge study found that deforestation was lower in 92 percent and forest degradation in 75 percent of projects,” the company added in a statement.
In response to this, Thales West, one of the academics that contributed to the investigative report, explained that while working as an auditor on Verra’s projects in the Brazilian Amazon, he discovered that the company’s “predictions about deforestation” cannot be trusted.
“The evidence from the analysis – not just the synthetic controls – suggests we cannot” trust Verra, West said. “I want this system to work to protect rainforests. For that to happen, we need to acknowledge the scale of problems with the current system.”
Erin Sills, a professor at the Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University, also commented on the Cambridge study cited in the investigative report, calling its findings “disappointing and scary.”
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