A couple of years ago, the Antiplanner described a Portland program of accepting carbon-offset funds to do traffic signal coordination. While I support signal coordination, the claimed benefits seemed outlandish. When I found out that the money came from an organization called Climate Trust that was co-founded by the director of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development, I smelled “scam.”
I didn’t pursue it any further, but it turns out I was right. According to this 2009 report from the Cascade Policy Institute, the Portland-based Climate Trust has been legally extorting money from energy companies for more than a decade and then failing to spend that money on activities that truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
