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Carbon Offsets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

LastWeekTonight · 5.9M views · 2022-08-22 · 23:38

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Overview

A Last Week Tonight segment explaining carbon offsets, what they claim to do, and how they may worsen climate change. It looks at perverse incentives and questionable projects.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as an informative explainer on why many carbon offset schemes are not genuine.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2022–2023

Topics

Climate policy, solutions & debateMedia, journalism & propaganda
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carbon creditsclimate changegreenwashingjohn oliveremissions

What people said

joshvm · 2023-09 · Recommendation

It's complicated, but John Oliver did a good segment on it. [VIDEO] Planting trees is not an easy solution. [LINK] A major problem is that monitoring and verification is patchy. A carbon credit is in theory something like X ton-years, but there is no guarantee that what you pay for will be around in X years and policing us extremely difficult. X is traditionally 100 years. If I sell you a carbon credit and then cut all my trees down, what happens? Another is fraudulent sites - people selling credits for sites that already exist, we're already planned for protection, etc.

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d4nyll · 2023-06 · Recommendation

John Oliver with a quite informative video about why many carbon offsets/carbon credits schemes are most likely not genuine in their attempts to offset carbon emissions. [VIDEO]

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russdill · 2022-09 · Recommendation

In theory, it's great. In practice perverse incentives and little to no regulation make it worthless. A John Oliver explainer: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by LastWeekTonight, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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