U.S. forests are great at capturing carbon in the atmosphere and storing carbon in long-lived products such as lumber and plywood. However, according to regulators, carbon offsets are supposed to be 1) real, 2) permanent, 3) verifiable, and, most important, 4) additional to a business-as-usual scenario. Forest-based carbon credits perform poorly by three of these metrics. … most if not all large-scale forest-based carbon projects are paying forest landowners to do something that they are already doing, thus failing to meet the “additionality” criterion. Furthermore, trees are too easily substituted in a sawmill, so a harvest deferral by one landowner will simply be met by an acceleration by another. … Finally, carbon projects on existing “working forests” are an inefficient use of carbon-emission-mitigation funds, which would be better spent on reducing smokestack emissions, funding renewable-energy development or planting otherwise unforested land, among other more worthy endeavors. [We respect the copyrights of the source publication – full access may require a subscription]