Tag Archives: carbon offsets

Mongabay: Our investigation exposed biomass giant’s greenwashing in 2022—here’s the latest in 2025

Felled hardwood and pine cut from a dense forest and piled high on a 52-acre lot in Edenton, North Carolina. Image by Bobby Amoroso.

It’s not often that a news organization reflects on its coverage over recent years to evaluate the impact that that coverage has had on a region, a group of people, and in this case, an industry. But in making the case to our global readers and funders, Mongabay recaps important stories or series of stories to let people know that independent environmental journalism can and does make a difference in the world.

In this story penned by Mongabay editors, they recap my coverage of the forest biomass industry over the last several years and explain the impact it has and continues to have. The story rightfully focuses on one of the most prominent and impactful stories of my long career in journalism — the one and only whistleblower to ever come forward from inside the forest biomass industry (from Enviva, once the world’s largest producer of wood pellets for industrial-scale energy) and his candid, verifiable attack on his company’s climate- and environmentally friendly claims of the product it produces. That story, which has a complementary video, was published in December 2022.

Here’s an excerpt from Mongabay’s story of my reporting:

“This case demonstrates how independent journalism can expose greenwashing, inspire tangible action, inform public policy, and create ripple effects across sectors. Mongabay’s reporting uncovered the troubling realities of the biomass energy industry, and it empowered governments, financial institutions, and legal advocates to take decisive action in the pursuit of accountability and environmental justice.”

KCRW Los Angeles: Microsoft wants to go carbon negative. What does that mean?

Building 92 at Microsoft Corporation headquarters in Redmond, Washington, 2016.
Building 92 at Microsoft Corporation headquarters in Redmond, Washington, 2016.Credit: Coolcaesar (CC BY-SA 4.0).

I am fortunate to have a good friend working as a producer in Los Angeles on the popular noon public radio program called Press Play with Madeleine Brand on KCRW. I had worked with this talented producer previously when covering the last two UN climate summits in Poland and Spain. Recently, my friend accepted first pitch based on my story for Mongabay about Pachama, the Silicon Valley startup that will monitor the carbon offsets Microsoft to preserve forests in forests in North and South America.

The eight-minute interview is linked here. Press Play reaches much of Southern California. I hope it’s not my last time on the program.

Mongabay: Success of Microsoft’s ‘moonshot’ climate pledge hinges on forest conservation

Remote sensing through and artificial intelligence are keys to Pachama’s novel strategy for tracking the amount of carbon stored in forests for the purposes of augmenting the market for forest protection and carbon offsets. Photo courtesy Pachama

Here’s my story behind a Silicon Valley startup up with enormous ambitions when it comes to climate mitigation with a global client to match its lofty goals.

In mid-January, Microsoft made an astonishing pledge: a company that now emits 16 metric tons of greenhouse gases annually would become carbon negative by 2030, and by 2050, zero out all of the emissions it ever put up into the atmosphere since the company was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975.

Much of this effort would require “negative emissions,” or pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, not merely reducing its emissions from energy, transportation and infrastructure over its 12-country footprint. To do that, Microsoft will have to be heavily involved in protecting forests from deforestation to continue to act as a carbon sink, and contribute significantly to the reforestation of vast tracts of degraded land in order to pull more pollution from the sky.

My story focuses on the company, Pachama (Andean for Earth mother) that will do the high-tech aerial monitoring to verify that Microsoft’s carbon offset investments are intact and growing. It’s a critically important job if we are to get an accurate read on whether Microsoft, and others, are truly reducing their carbon footprint. I rarely get to write optimistic stories on climate mitigation, but this one certainly qualifies. It was a pleasure to interview the company’s smart and idealistic founder, Diego Saez-Gil.

Diego Saez-Gil, a native Argentinian with a graduate degree from Stanford, is a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Pachama is his third company. He got the idea while touring the Peruvian Amazon with his two brothers and witnessing massive deforestation from illegal gold mining. “We all wanted to do something about it,” he said. Image courtesy of Pachama.