I think most climate people are very suspicious of charities like this, rather than or in addition to not believing in ethical offsetting. See this Wendover Productions video on problematic, non-counterfactual, and outright fraudulent climate offsets. I myself am not confident that CATF offsets are good and would need to do a bunch of investigation, and most people are not willing to do this starting from, say, an 80% prior that CATF offsets are bad.
This article just made HN. It’s a report saying that 39 of 50 top offsetting programs are likely junk, 8 “look problematic”, and 3 lack sufficient information, with none being found good.
re: CATF, you can look at FP’s cost-effectiveness analysis of CATF’s work (past, future), along with their non-cost effectiveness-based reasoning (see Why do we trust this organisation?) and their general methodology for evaluating relative impact in high-uncertainty contexts like climate (where they argue that “bottom-up cost-effectiveness analyses as well as bottom-up plausibility checks… are fundamentally insufficient for claims of high impact”), and judge for yourself. I personally think that the notion of “CATF offsets” doesn’t make much sense once I drilled down to that level; if I donate to them it won’t be for ethical offsetting reasons.
re: the vast majority of offsetting-oriented climate charities, I’m skeptical myself.
I think most climate people are very suspicious of charities like this, rather than or in addition to not believing in ethical offsetting. See this Wendover Productions video on problematic, non-counterfactual, and outright fraudulent climate offsets. I myself am not confident that CATF offsets are good and would need to do a bunch of investigation, and most people are not willing to do this starting from, say, an 80% prior that CATF offsets are bad.
This article just made HN. It’s a report saying that 39 of 50 top offsetting programs are likely junk, 8 “look problematic”, and 3 lack sufficient information, with none being found good.
re: CATF, you can look at FP’s cost-effectiveness analysis of CATF’s work (past, future), along with their non-cost effectiveness-based reasoning (see Why do we trust this organisation?) and their general methodology for evaluating relative impact in high-uncertainty contexts like climate (where they argue that “bottom-up cost-effectiveness analyses as well as bottom-up plausibility checks… are fundamentally insufficient for claims of high impact”), and judge for yourself. I personally think that the notion of “CATF offsets” doesn’t make much sense once I drilled down to that level; if I donate to them it won’t be for ethical offsetting reasons.
re: the vast majority of offsetting-oriented climate charities, I’m skeptical myself.