Lisa Song

Trump official reminds the world that the US now has a 'national position' on a single word

It was meant to be a routine discussion on pollution. One by one, delegates at the United Nations expressed support for a new panel of scientists who would advise countries on how to address chemicals and toxic waste.

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But the U.S. delegate took the meeting in a new direction. She spent her allotted three minutes reminding the world that the United States now had a “national position” on a single word in the documents establishing the panel: gender.

“Use of the term ‘gender’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity and is demeaning and unfair, especially to women and girls,” the delegate told the U.N. in June.

The Trump administration is pushing its anti-trans agenda on a global stage, repeatedly objecting to the word “gender” in international resolutions and documents. During at least six speeches before the U.N., U.S. delegates have denounced so-called “gender ideology” or reinforced the administration’s support for language that “recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male.”

The delegates included federal civil service employees and the associate director of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s policies, who now works for the State Department. They delivered these statements during U.N. forums on topics as varied as women’s rights, science and technology, global health, toxic pollution and chemical waste. Even a resolution meant to reaffirm cooperation between the U.N. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations became an opportunity to bring up the issue.

Insisting that everyone’s gender is determined biologically at birth leaves no room for the existence of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, who face discrimination and violence around the world. Intersex people have variations in chromosomes, hormone levels or anatomy that differ from what’s considered typical for male and female bodies. A federal report published in January just before President Donald Trump took office, estimated there are more than 5 million intersex Americans.

On at least two occasions, U.S. delegates urged the U.N. to adopt its language on men and women, though it’s unclear if the U.S.’ position has led to any policy changes at the U.N. But the effects of the country’s objections are more than symbolic, said Kristopher Velasco, a sociology professor at Princeton University who studies how international institutions and nongovernmental organizations have worked to expand or curtail LGBTQ+ rights.

U.N. documents can influence countries’ policies over time and set an international standard for human rights, which advocates can cite as they campaign for less discriminatory policies, Velasco said. The phrase “gender ideology” has emerged as a “catchall term” for far-right anxieties about declining fertility rates and a decrease in “traditional” heterosexual families, he said.

At the U.N., the administration has promoted other aspects of its domestic agenda. For example, U.S. delegates have demanded the removal of references to tackling climate change and voted against an International Day of Hope because the text contained references to diversity, equity and inclusion. (The two-page document encouraged a “more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth” and welcomed “respect for diversity.”)

But the reflexive resistance to the word “gender” is particularly noteworthy.

Advocates for LGBTQ+ rights said the U.S.’ repeated condemnation of “gender ideology” signals support for more repressive regimes.

The U.S. is sending the world “a clear message: that the identities and rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people are negotiable,” Ash Lazarus Orr, press relations manager at the nonprofit Advocates for Trans Equality, said in a statement.

Laurel Sprague, research director at the Williams Institute, a policy center focused on sexual orientations and gender identities at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she’s concerned that other countries will take similar positions on transgender rights to gain favor with the U.S. Last month Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the U.N., told a Senate committee that he wants to use a country’s record of voting with or against the U.S. at the U.N. as a metric for deciding foreign aid.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement: “President Trump was overwhelmingly elected to restore common sense to government, which means focusing foreign policy on securing peace deals and putting America First — not enforcing woke gender ideology.”

A clash between Trump’s administration and certain U.N. institutions over transgender rights was almost inevitable.

Trump’s hostility to transgender rights was a key part of his election campaign. On his first day in office, he issued an executive order called “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” The order claimed there were only two “immutable” sexes. Eight days later, Trump signed an executive order restricting gender-affirming surgery for anyone under 19. Federal agencies have since forced trans service members out of the military and sued California for its refusal to ban trans athletes from girls’ sports teams.

In June, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized American government officials for their statements “vilifying transgender and non-binary people.” The human rights office urges U.N. member states to provide gender-affirming care and says the organization has “affirmed the right of trans persons to legal recognition of their gender identity and a change of gender in official documents, including birth certificates.” The office also supports the rights of intersex people.

“Intersex people in the U.S. are extremely worried” that they will become bigger targets, said Sylvan Fraser Anthony, legal and policy director at the intersex advocacy group InterACT.

“In all regions of the world, we are witnessing a pushback against women’s human rights and gender equality,” Laura Gelbert Godinho Delgado, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s human rights office, said in an email. “This has fueled misogyny, anti-LGBTI rhetoric, and hate speech.”

The Trump administration’s insistence on litigating “gender” complicates the already ponderous procedures of the U.N. Many decisions are made by consensus, which could require representatives from more than 100 countries to agree on every word. Phrases and single words still under debate are marked with brackets. Some draft documents end up with hundreds of brackets, awaiting resolution at a subsequent date.

At the June meeting on chemical pollution, delegates decided to form a scientific panel but couldn’t agree on crucial details about whether the panel’s purpose included “the protection of human health and the environment.” A description of the panel included brackets on whether it would work in a way that integrates “gender equality and equity” or “equality between men and women.”

The U.S. delegate, Liz Nichols, reminded the U.N. at one point that it “is the policy of the United States to use clear and accurate language that recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male. It is important to acknowledge the biological reality of sex to support the needs and perspectives of women and girls.”

Career staffers like Nichols are hired for subject-matter expertise and work to execute the agenda of whichever administration is in charge, regardless of personal beliefs. Nichols has a doctorate in ecology from Columbia University and has worked for the State Department since 2018. When asked for comment, she referred ProPublica to the State Department.

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement, “As President Trump’s Executive Orders and our public remarks have repeatedly stated, this administration will continue to defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”

Gender is a crucial factor in chemical safety, said Rachel Radvany, environmental health campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law who attended the meeting. Pregnant people are uniquely vulnerable to chemical exposure and women are disproportionately exposed to toxic compounds, including through beauty and menstrual products.

Radvany said the statement read by Nichols contributed to the uncertainty on how the panel would consider gender in its work. The brackets around gender-related issues and other topics remained in the draft decision and will have to be resolved at a future gathering that may not happen until next summer.

The U.S. has also staked out similar positions at U.N. meetings focused on gender. At a session of the Commission on the Status of Women in March, Jonathan Shrier, a longtime State Department employee who now works for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, said the U.S. disapproved of a declaration supporting “the empowerment of all women and girls” that mentioned the word “gender.” The phrase “all women and girls” in U.N. documents has been used as a way to be inclusive of trans women and girls.

Shrier read a statement saying that several factors in the text made it impossible for the U.S. to back the resolution, which the commission had recently adopted. That included “lapses in using clear and accurate language that recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male.”

During the summit, Shrier repeated those talking points at an event co-sponsored by the U.S. government and the Center for Family and Human Rights, or C-Fam. The group’s mission statement says its goal is the “preservation of international law by discrediting socially radical policies at the United Nations and other international institutions.”

Shrier directed questions to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, which did not respond. Responding to questions from ProPublica, C-Fam’s president, Austin Ruse, said in a statement that the U.S. position on gender is in line with the definitions found in an important U.N. document on the empowerment of women from 1995.

Some countries have pushed back against the U.S.’ stance, often in ways that appear subtle to the casual observer. The U.N. social and environmental forums where these speeches have been delivered tend to operate with a culture of civility and little direct confrontation, said Alessandra Nilo, external relations director for the Americas and the Caribbean at the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Nilo has participated in U.N. forums on HIV/AIDS and women’s health since 2000.

When other delegates speak out in support of diversity and women’s rights, it’s a sign of their disapproval and a way to isolate the U.S., Nilo said. During the women’s rights summit, the delegate from Brazil celebrated “the expansion of gender and diversity language” in the declaration.

Nilo said many countries are scared to speak out for fear of losing trade deals or potential foreign aid from the U.S.

Advocating an “America First” platform, Trump has upended U.S. commitments to multinational organizations and alliances. He signed orders withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization and various U.N. bodies, such as the Human Rights Council and the cultural group UNESCO.

It’s rare for the U.N. to directly affect legislation in the U.S. But the Trump administration repeatedly cites concerns that U.N. documents could supersede American policy.

In April, the U.S. criticized a draft resolution on global health debated at a meeting of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development. Spencer Chretien, the U.S. delegate, opposed references to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, which provide a blueprint for how countries can prosper economically while improving gender equality and protecting the environment. Chretien called the program a form of “soft global governance” that conflicts with national sovereignty. Chretien also touted the administration’s “unequivocal rejection of gender ideology extremism” and renewed membership in the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an antiabortion document signed by more than 30 countries, including Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia and South Sudan. The first Trump administration co-sponsored the initiative in 2020 before the Biden administration withdrew from it.

Chretien helped write Project 2025 when he worked at The Heritage Foundation. He is now a senior bureau official in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. Chretien couldn’t be reached for comment.

The U.N. proposal on global health faced additional opposition from Burundi, Djibouti and Nigeria, where abortion is generally illegal. Delegates from those countries were upset about references to “sexual and reproductive health services,” which could include abortion access. The commission chair withdrew the resolution, seeing no way to reach consensus.

During a July forum about a document on sustainable development, the U.S. delegate, Shrier, asked for a vote on several paragraphs about gender, climate change and various forms of discrimination. In his objections, he cited two paragraphs that he argued advanced “this radical abortion agenda through the terms ‘sexual and reproductive health’ and ‘reproductive rights.’”

The final vote on whether to retain those paragraphs was 141 to 2, with only the U.S. and Ethiopia voting no. (Several countries abstained.)

When the results lit up the screen, the chamber broke into thunderous applause.

NOW READ: There's a very simple reason why Trump will never release the Epstein files

Doris Burke contributed research.

Government scientists are cleaning their own bathrooms as result of 'efficiency' plan

Federal scientists responsible for monitoring the health of West Coast fisheries are cleaning office bathrooms and reconsidering critical experiments after the Department of Commerce failed to renew their lab’s contracts for hazardous waste disposal, janitorial services, IT and building maintenance.

Trash is piling up at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staffers told ProPublica. Ecologists, chemists and biologists at Montlake Laboratory, the center’s headquarters in Seattle, are taking turns hauling garbage to the dumpster and discussing whether they should create a sign-up sheet to scrub toilets.

The scientists — who conduct genetic sampling of endangered salmon to check the species’ stock status and survival — routinely work with chemicals that can burn skin, erupt into flames and cause cancer. At least one said they’d have to delay mission-critical research if hazardous waste removal isn’t restored.

The deteriorating conditions at Montlake stem from a new policy at the Commerce Department that says Secretary Howard Lutnick must personally approve all contracts over $100,000. NPR reported that the bottleneck has disrupted operations at many NOAA facilities.

ProPublica spoke to three Montlake employees who described what it was like to work there as, one by one, service contracts expire and aren’t renewed. People are running around looking for compost bags and wondering who will empty out the female sanitary waste containers in the bathrooms, they said. The floors are getting dirty and workers have no access to vacuums or mops. Some scientists have bought their own soap and cleaning supplies.

Nor can people escape by working from home: the Trump administration has increasingly ordered federal workers to return to the office five days a week. At Montlake, that policy will apply to everyone by April 21.

“It’s making our work unsafe, and it’s unsanitary for any workplace,” but especially an active laboratory full of fire-reactive chemicals and bacteria, one Montlake researcher said.

Press officers at NOAA, the Commerce Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Montlake employees were informed last week that a contract for safety services — which includes the staff who move laboratory waste off-campus to designated disposal sites — would lapse after April 9, leaving just one person responsible for this task. Hazardous waste “pickups from labs may be delayed,” employees were warned in a recent email.

The building maintenance team’s contract expired Wednesday, which decimated the staff that had handled plumbing, HVAC and the elevators. Other contacts lapsed in late March, leaving the Seattle lab with zero janitorial staff and a skeleton crew of IT specialists.

During a big staff meeting at Montlake on Wednesday, lab leaders said they had no updates on when the contracts might be renewed, one researcher said. They also acknowledged it was unfair that everyone would need to pitch in on janitorial duties on top of their actual jobs.

Nick Tolimieri, a union representative for Montlake employees, said the problem is “all part of the large-scale bullying program” to push out federal workers. It seems like every Friday “we get some kind of message that makes you unable to sleep for the entire weekend,” he said. Now, with these lapsed contracts, it’s getting “more and more petty.”

The problems, large and small, at Montlake provide a case study of the chaos that’s engulfed federal workers across many agencies as the Trump administration has fired staff, dumped contracts and eliminated long-time operational support. Yesterday, hundreds of NOAA workers who had been fired in February, then briefly reinstated, were fired again.

Local management had new service contracts ready to go ages ago, Tolimieri said. The delay from headquarters means employees will struggle to get repairs for their computers or basic building maintenance; the aging elevators at Montlake already break so often that Tolimieri joked it would be easier to send notices on the occasions when they did work.

The fisheries center employs more than 350 people, most of whom work at Montlake. The rest are scattered across several research stations in Oregon and Washington.

Staff at the center conduct research and provide scientific advice for policies on sustainable fishing and endangered species, including a population of orcas in Puget Sound. They test seafood after oil spills to ensure the fish are safe to eat. Their work helps restore native salmon populations and support regional farming.

NOAA is “so uncontroversial,” said the Montlake researcher who’s worried about hazardous waste disposal. Employees are just “trying to do weather reports and give people good seafood.”

The researcher said lab workers are trained in basic lab safety, so the chemicals are properly stored, handled and placed into appropriate waste containers after use. But there’s a limit to how much chemical waste can be kept on site. And the contractors who left were experts on handling emergencies like large chemical spills or serious toxic exposures.

If those contractors don’t return soon, the researcher said, the lab may need to delay or pause important research.

That could include chemical-intensive lab work like testing sea lions, killer whales and walruses from Alaska for environmental contaminants, Tolimieri said.

“For a bunch of people who are screaming about efficiency,” he said, referring to the administration’s efforts to downsize the federal government, “they’ve done the most inefficient things possible.”

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Cancer institute can’t publish info on these topics without special approval

Employees at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, received internal guidance last week to flag manuscripts, presentations or other communications for scrutiny if they addressed “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics. Among the 23 hot-button issues, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica: vaccines, fluoride, peanut allergies, autism.

While it’s not uncommon for the cancer institute to outline a couple of administration priorities, the scope and scale of the list is unprecedented and highly unusual, said six employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. All materials must be reviewed by an institute “clearance team,” according to the records, and could be examined by officials at the NIH or its umbrella agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Staffers and experts worried that the directive would delay or halt the publication of research. “This is micromanagement at the highest level,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

The list touches on the personal priorities of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who has repeatedly promoted medical conspiracy theories and false claims. He has advanced the idea that rising rates of autism are linked to vaccines, a claim that has been debunked by hundreds of scientific studies. He has also suggested that aluminum in vaccines is responsible for childhood allergies (his son reportedly is severely allergic to peanuts). And he has claimed that water fluoridation — which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called “one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century” — is an “industrial waste.”

In confirmation hearings in January, Kennedy said that he was not “anti-vaccine,” and that as secretary, he would not discourage people from getting immunized for measles or polio, but he dodged questions about the link between autism and vaccines.

Another term on the list, “cancer moonshot,” refers to a programlaunched by President Barack Obama in 2016. It was a priority of the Biden administration, which intended for the program to cut the nation’s cancer death rate by at least half and prevent more than 4 million deaths.

The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with — like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email.

The guidance states that staffers “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority.”

A longtime senior employee at the institute said that the directive was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level. It is not clear in which exact office the directive originated. The NCI, NIH and HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. (The existence of the list was first revealed in social media posts on Friday.)

Health and research experts told ProPublica they feared the chilling effect of the new guidance. Not only might it lead to a lengthier and more complex clearance process, it may also cause researchers to censor their work out of fear or deference to the administration’s priorities.

“This is real interference in the scientific process,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades. The list, she said, “just seems like Big Brother intimidation.”

During the first two months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration has slashed funding for research institutions and stalled the NIH’s grant application process.

Kennedy has suggested that hundreds of NIH staffers should be fired and said that the institute should deprioritize infectious diseases like COVID-19 and shift its focus to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity.

Obesity is on the NCI’s new list, as are infectious diseases including COVID-19, bird flu and measles.

The “focus on bird flu and covid is concerning,” Woodruff wrote, because “not being transparent with the public about infectious diseases will not stop them or make them go away and could make them worse.”

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Revealed: Device to stop bleeding among scientific research Ted Cruz calls 'woke'

A few months ago, Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he had uncovered $2 billion of science grants funded by former President Joe Biden’s administration that prioritized “radical political perspectives” or “neo-Marxist theories.’’ His aides on a congressional committee assembled the list by searching the project descriptions for 699 key terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture.”

When Cruz released the database of this allegedly “woke” research earlier this month, we decided to run our own experiment. We asked one of the models powering ChatGPT, which can sift through large amounts of data, to evaluate all 3,500 grant descriptions in the database as if it were an investigative journalist looking for Marxist propaganda, “woke ideology,” or diversity, equity and inclusion. The model tried to give us descriptions of how each project might fit those themes. We were particularly interested in the grants where it came up blank. We then read through the researchers’ full summaries of those and many other grants, including each one described in this story, looking for references to some of the keywords on the list.

We found that Cruz’s dragnet had swept up numerous examples of scientific projects funded by the National Science Foundation that simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee.

Among them, for example, was a $470,000 grant to study the evolution of mint plants and how they spread across continents. As best we can tell, the project ran into trouble with Republicans on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation because of two specific words used in its application to the NSF: “diversify,” referring to the biodiversity of plants, and “female,” where the application noted how the project would support a young female scientist on the research team.

Other projects our AI assistant led us to included:

  • Developing a device that could treat severe bleeding. It seems to have caught the committee’s attention for using the words “victims” — as in gunshot victims — and “trauma.”
  • Creating biosensors to detect infectious diseases. The grant appears to have been tagged for the repeated use of “POC,” an acronym often used for “people of color” but in this context meaning “point of care” — that is, the place where people receive medical treatment — and “barrier,” referring to a part of the biosensor itself.
  • Designing eye-tracking technology for diagnosing and treating concussions. It appears to have gotten flagged for referencing “traumatic” brain injuries and the “status,” meaning the condition, of patients.

It’s “very frightening,” said Charlotte Lindqvist, a biology professor at the University at Buffalo who is conducting the research on mint plants.

Lindqvist spends hours a day grinding up plant samples and analyzing their DNA to identify genetic differences between species. Studying plant diversity, she said, could help secure more resilient food systems. “We are really trying very, very hard ... to move our world forward, understanding it better through our sort of foundational, sometimes groundbreaking research,” she said, “and then you get flagged and blacklisted because there is a word like ‘female’ in your project.”

Staff for the Republicans on the Senate committee assembled their report by examining all NSF grants awarded to projects that began between January 2021 and April 2024. Using their list of keywords, they flagged those earmarked for research that they said was “often based on neo-Marxist theories that identified merit by physical or ethnic attributes, not one’s talent, work ethic, or intellectual curiosity.”

Evaluating the merits of these awards would require a deep understanding of dozens of scientific fields, from gravitational waves to DNA methylation. But the report describes a crude approach; while staffers did attempt to account for the different ways their keywords can be used, they did not manually review all grants. The report also failed to acknowledge that the NSF has a legal mandate to make science more inclusive of women, racial minorities and disabled people.

Cruz released the full database just as the Trump administration’s NSF said it was examining research grants to make sure they complied with the president’s executive orders terminating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Cruz said he requested “significant scrutiny” of the grants in his database. At the time, the NSF was using a similar list of keywords for its review.

Neither Cruz’s office nor a spokesperson for Republicans on the committee responded to requests for comment.

It’s not clear if approved projects that are still waiting for payments will get their money. A federal judge ruled last Friday that the administration can’t cancel or freeze grants for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion programs. When asked how it would respond to the judge’s preliminary injunction, an NSF spokesperson directed ProPublica to an agency webpage, which had not been updated with information about the court ruling at the time of publication.

“NSF is working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a spokesperson told ProPublica in response to questions about its review process.

The Senate committee’s list includes words like “diversify” and “biases,” which have technical meanings unrelated to social issues. Although the report’s authors worked to remove grants flagged for those reasons, some, like Lindqvist’s, slipped through.

The lack of precision in the committee’s methodology is “obviously laughable,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional governments. But she also worries about what might happen if lawmakers take a more serious approach, such as trying to ban research on racial inequality, similar to how Congress severely limited studies on gun violence.

The NSF evaluates grant proposals based on two factors. The first is intellectual merit. Every application is reviewed by a panel of experts — often other academics — who specialize in the same topic. They pore over detailed applications that include data, references and researchers’ qualifications, far more information than the brief summaries evaluated by the Senate committee.

The other factor is “broader impacts,” which could include how the research might benefit societal well-being or make science more inclusive.

Currently, federal laws require the NSF to support research at historically Black colleges and universities and other institutions that serve groups who are underrepresented in science. Congress also ordered the NSF to fund efforts “designed to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement” of members of these groups in scientific careers.

“All of that is hard-wired into federal funding,” Scheppele said. “If anyone was ‘woke,’ it was Congress.”

Laws passed by Congress have more legal weight than executive orders, so the NSF shouldn’t prioritize Trump’s order over its mandate to support underrepresented people in science, Scheppele said. The White House, she said in an email, is “literally asking the NSF to violate the law!”

The committee report singled out some projects for simply acknowledging that people from certain demographics face unique challenges. That includes a University of Houston study of maternal mortality that examines why Black, Indigenous and other people of color in the U.S. are nearly three times as likely as white women to die during pregnancy or within the first year after childbirth. Another project, which involved using drones to deliver defibrillators to people suffering cardiac arrest, appeared to be flagged because it noted that emergency response times are slower in low-income and minority neighborhoods.

In other cases, the keywords that caught the committee’s attention may have come from outreach efforts meant to broaden the impact of the research. A $6 million nuclear astrophysics project to study the origins of the universe includes a reference to attracting a “diverse group” of students interested in the subject and a summer school program for increasing interest in nuclear-science careers, “especially among women and minorities.”

That’s in line with a 1998 law that ordered the NSF to develop “intellectual capital, both people and ideas, with particular emphasis on groups and regions that traditionally have not participated fully in science, mathematics, and engineering.”

Congress recognized “you’re going to get better science” that way, said Melissa Finucane, vice president of science and innovation at the Union of Concerned Scientists. When you get different perspectives interacting and thinking about complex problems, she said, you’ll get different and new ways of solving a problem.

The report’s “sledgehammer” methodology ignores the substantial scientific merit of these projects, many of which address “critical national needs in areas such as aerospace, agriculture, and computing infrastructure — as well as the need to broaden the talent pool,” a spokesperson for Democrats on the Senate committee said in an email. The email said that ranking Democrat Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington “understands that there is no way the United States can compete” with the rest of the world on innovation “without ensuring that NSF funding emphasizes the participation of women and minorities in STEM,” a reference to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Rice University professor Vicky Yao has seen firsthand how efforts to broaden participation can increase excitement and interest in science.

When Yao applied for a research grant in 2022, she included outreach to community college students, many of whom are from underrepresented populations and don’t have access to research opportunities.

When ProPublica informed Yao her $610,000 project was on the Senate committee’s list, she found it bizarre that such technical work on DNA methylation — a process that can affect cancer and neurological diseases — could be labeled as “woke.”

The committee’s choice of keywords is so sweeping that shutting down the research that uses those terms would end not just diversity programs but also vast fields of research on social science (“Black communities,” “racial inequality,” “LGBT”), climate change (“net zero,” “climate research,” “clean energy”) and medicine (“white women,” “victims,” “trauma”).

If any research related to women or minority populations is under fire, then “we’re talking about maybe 65% of the American population. So at that point, what’s left?” said Dominic Boyer, an anthropology professor at Rice University whose project on reducing flood risk was flagged by the committee. “Under what authority, or according to what philosophy, can a government invalidate or discredit research that’s focusing on two-thirds of the population?”

Boyer received an award of $750,000 to use nature-based solutions like rain gardens to reduce flooding in Houston, where Hurricane Harvey displaced tens of thousands of people in 2017. His team has begun collaborating closely with residents from three neighborhoods: two lower-income communities where the residents are mostly Hispanic, Black or Asian, and a middle-income neighborhood with mostly Hispanic and white residents.

He initially assumed that’s why his research was flagged. But it turned out that the triggering keywords may have come from boilerplate language that describes the specific NSF program that funded Boyer’s work: Strengthening American Infrastructure. The portions of the grant’s program description containing those keywords were written by the NSF during Trump’s first term. It used the words “socioeconomic” and “equal opportunity” to explain why infrastructure is important to society. The same description is found in more than two dozen other grants on the committee’s list.

Boyer said it speaks to a kind of “Orwellian absurdity” that “these words can only have one meaning, and it’s the meaning that they would like to politicize.”

Sharon Lerner contributed reporting and Brandon Roberts contributed data reporting.

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The rewriting of a pioneering female astronomer’s legacy shows how far Trump’s DEI purge will go

During his first presidential term, Donald Trump signed a congressional act naming a federally funded observatory after the late astronomer Vera Rubin. The act celebrated her landmark research on dark matter — the invisible, mysterious substance that makes up much of the universe — and noted that she was an outspoken advocate for the equal treatment and representation of women in science.

“Vera herself offers an excellent example of what can happen when more minds participate in science,” the observatory’s website said of Rubin — up until recently.

By Monday morning, a section of her online biography titled, “She advocated for women in science,” was gone. It reappeared in a stripped-down form later that day amid a chaotic federal government response to Trump’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

While there are far more seismic changes afoot in America than the revision of three paragraphs on a website, the page’s edit trail provides an opportunity to peer into how institutions and agencies are navigating the new administration’s intolerance of anything perceived as “woke” and illuminates a calculation officials must make in answering a wide-open question:

How far is too far when it comes to acknowledging inequality and advocating against it?

“Vera Rubin, whose career began in the 1960s, faced a lot of barriers simply because she was a woman,” the altered section of the bio began. “She persisted in studying science when her male advisors told her she shouldn't,” and she balanced her career with raising children, a rarity at the time. “Her strength in overcoming these challenges is admirable on its own, but Vera worked even harder to help other women navigate what was, during her career, a very male-dominated field.”

That first paragraph disappeared temporarily, then reappeared, untouched, midday Monday.

That was not the case for the paragraph that followed: “Science is still a male-dominated field, but Rubin Observatory is working to increase participation from women and other people who have historically been excluded from science. Rubin Observatory welcomes everyone who wants to contribute to science, and takes steps to lower or eliminate barriers that exclude those with less privilege.”

That paragraph was gone as of Thursday afternoon, as was the assertion that Rubin shows what can happen when “more minds” participate in science. The word “more” was replaced with “many,” shifting the meaning.

“I’m sure Vera would be absolutely furious,” said Jacqueline Mitton, an astronomer and author who co-wrote a biography of Rubin’s life. Mitton said the phrase “more minds” implies that “you want minds from people from every different background,” an idea that follows naturally from the now-deleted text on systemic barriers.

She said Rubin, who died in 2016, would want the observatory named after her to continue her work advocating for women and other groups who have long been underrepresented in science.

It’s unclear who ordered the specific alterations of Rubin’s biography. The White House, the observatory and the federal agencies that fund it, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

The observatory’s page on diversity, equity and inclusion was also missing Thursday afternoon. An archived version from Dec. 19 shows that it described the institution’s efforts “to ensure fair and unbiased execution” of the hiring process, including training hiring committee members “on unconscious bias.” The DEI program also included educational and public outreach efforts, such as “meeting web accessibility standards” and plans to build partnerships with “organizations serving audiences traditionally under-represented” in science and technology.

Similar revisions are taking shape across the country as companies have reversed their DEI policies and the Trump administration has placed employees working on DEI initiatives on leave.

If the changes to Rubin’s biography are any indication of what remains acceptable under Trump’s vision for the federal government, then certain facts about historical disparities are safe for now. But any recognition that these biases persist appears to be in the crosshairs.

The U.S. Air Force even pulled training videos about Black airmen and civilian women pilots who served in World War II. (The Air Force later said it would continue to show the videos in training, but certain material related to diversity would be suspended for review.)

One of Rubin’s favorite sayings was, “Half of all brains are in women,” Mitton said. Her book recounts how Rubin challenged sexist language in science publications, advocated for women to take leadership roles in professional organizations and declined to speak at an event in 1972 held at a club where women were only allowed to enter through a back door.

Jacqueline Hewitt, who was a graduate student when she met Rubin at conferences, said she was inspired by Rubin’s research and how she never hid the fact that she had kids. “It was really important to see someone who could succeed,” said Hewitt, the Julius A. Stratton professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It felt like you could succeed also.”

Rubin was awarded the National Medal of Science by then-President Bill Clinton in 1993. The observatory, located in a part of Chile where conditions are ideal for observational astronomy, was named after her in 2019 and includes a powerful telescope; it will “soon witness the explosions of millions of dying stars” and “capture the cosmos in exquisite detail,” according to its website.

Mitton said the observatory is a memorial that continues Rubin’s mission to include not just many people in astronomy, but more of those who haven’t historically gotten a chance to make their mark.

“It’s very sad that’s being undermined,” she said, “because the job isn’t done.”

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This nonprofit promised to preserve wildlife. Then it made millions claiming it could cut down trees

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The Massachusetts Audubon Society has long managed its land in western Massachusetts as crucial wildlife habitat. Nature lovers flock to these forests to enjoy bird-watching and quiet hikes, with the occasional bobcat or moose sighting.

But in 2015, the conservation nonprofit presented California's top climate regulator with a startling scenario: It could heavily log 9,700 acres of its preserved forests over the next few years.

The group raised the possibility of chopping down hundreds of thousands of trees as part of its application to take part in California's forest offset program.

The state's Air Resources Board established the system to harness the ability of trees to absorb and store carbon to help the state meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals.

The program allows forest owners like Mass Audubon to earn so-called carbon credits for preserving trees. Each credit represents a ton of CO2. California polluters, such as oil companies, buy these credits so that they can emit more CO2 than they'd otherwise be allowed to under state law. Theoretically, the exchange should balance out emissions to prevent an overall increase in CO2 in the atmosphere.

The Air Resources Board accepted Mass Audubon's project into its program, requiring the nonprofit to preserve its forests over the next century instead of heavily logging them. The nonprofit received more than 600,000 credits in exchange for its promise. The vast majority were sold through intermediaries to oil and gas companies, records show. The group earned about $6 million from the sales, Mass Audubon regional scientist Tom Lautzenheiser said.

On paper, the deal was a success. The fossil fuel companies were able emit more CO2 while abiding by California's climate laws. Mass Audubon earned enough money to acquire additional land for preservation, and to hire new staff working on climate change.

But it didn't work out as well for the climate, unless Mass Audubon actually intended to start acting more like a timber company. The project wouldn't achieve anywhere near the claimed levels of reduced carbon emissions if the nonprofit was getting credits for forests that were never in danger of aggressive logging. And every time a polluter uses a credit that didn't actually save a ton of carbon, net emissions go up, undermining the point of the program.

In order for California's system to work, carbon market experts say, the program must cause carbon savings that wouldn't have happened in the absence of the program. If Mass Audubon had already planned to preserve the forest, then the carbon credits program is paying to save trees that were never at risk.

The concept in question is known as “additionality." And how regulators create rules to ensure it happens is at the heart of the debate about whether California's carbon offset program is actually benefiting the environment.

To the Air Resources Board, the landowner's intent is not important. So long as the land could have been logged in a way that is legal, doesn't lose money, and doesn't exceed typical logging practices in that region, the agency's rules treat the savings to the atmosphere as real.

Some offset researchers argue that the state's approach allows landowners to claim credits for trees that were never in danger.

New research by the San Francisco nonprofit CarbonPlan provides evidence that this is occurring: It shows that landowners in the program routinely maximize the number of trees they assert they could chop down if they weren't given carbon credits, even if they have little history of logging or have mission statements in sharp opposition to such practices.

The research suggests the program could be significantly exaggerating the amount of carbon savings achieved.

“The nearly universal pattern we see in the data," said Danny Cullenward, policy director at CarbonPlan and a coauthor of the study, corroborates concerns that “those projects are not delivering real climate benefits."

That finding was one piece of a larger study that concluded the program issued tens of millions of carbon credits that don't achieve real climate benefits. As ProPublica and MIT Technology Review reported recently, those ghost credits were the result of oversimplified calculations of average carbon levels in forests.

The Air Resources Board defended the program and its approval of Mass Audubon's project.

The agency said the project met the agency's criteria for additionality. It would be “unrealistic and impractical" to develop rules that require regulators “to essentially read the mind of each project developer," said Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for the agency.

Clegern noted that environmental groups sued the Air Resources Board over its forest offset program in 2012. An appellate court ruled that the agency had reasonably interpreted the law in assessing additionality this way.

“We've litigated and won the right to define it as our program does, and implement it as we have," Clegern said. “Their study judges California's program by their standard which has no legal basis."

However improbable the idea might be of a conservation group actually permitting the removal of so much timber, Mass Audubon officials said they had simply followed the state's rules in claiming that the society could heavily log its forest.

Mass Audubon “would not have done this," Lautzenheiser said in an interview, “if we felt like the benefits to the atmosphere weren't real."

When asked whether the nonprofit intended to log to the levels laid out in the documents, Lautzenheiser did not directly answer.

“We don't agree with the premise of your question. We are confident that our project provides a net carbon benefit to the atmosphere because it meets all additionality requirements" of California's program, he said.

“Mass Audubon is participating in this program in good faith, has implemented a project meeting all relevant standards, and through the project has reinforced its commitment to the long-term stewardship of enrolled forestlands," Lautzenheiser said.

Setting the Floor

By their nature, forest offset systems create incentives for landowners to exaggerate the amount of logging possible on their property. Landowners who assert they would have cut down all their trees can earn more credits and make more money than landowners who propose to cut down less of their forest.

Earlier offset programs sought to limit this by confirming what each project owner had genuinely intended to do. But it's nearly impossible to know what might have happened in the absence of the program, creating problems that led to significant overcrediting, according to earlier analyses.

California's Air Resources Board tried to address this problem with objective criteria, creating standards that all projects could be judged against in the same way.

The state's program prevents landowners from asserting that all of their trees are available for logging. Instead, it sets a floor based on how typical private landowners harvest their forests, using federal data on the average carbon levels stored in similar forest types in the region. Landowners must submit logging scenarios that, on average over a hundred years, do not fall below this floor.

CarbonPlan's research shows that landowners are submitting project applications that consistently approach the floor set by the Air Resources Board. It found that nearly 90% of the 65 projects analyzed cited future logging possibilities that fell less than 5% above the floor.

Mass Audubon's scenario was even closer, at 0.2%.

The state approved these projects even though it's highly unlikely that almost all the landowners were about to start chopping down their trees to carbon levels so close to the floor, Cullenward said.

In conducting the systemwide analysis of the program, CarbonPlan's researchers also noticed that conservation organizations like Mass Audubon were regularly participating in the program. They identified at least a dozen projects involving forests that wouldn't seem to be at risk of aggressive logging.

Clegern said the program's safeguards prevent the problems identified by CarbonPlan.

California's offsets are considered additional carbon reductions because the floor serves “as a conservative backstop," Clegern said. Without it, he explained, many landowners could have logged to even lower levels in the absence of offsets.

Clegern added that the agency's rules were adopted as a result of a lengthy process of debate and were upheld by the courts. A California Court of Appeal found the Air Resources Board had the discretion to use a standardized approach to evaluate whether projects were additional.

But the court did not make an independent determination about the effectiveness of the standard, and was “quite deferential to the agency's judgment," said Alice Kaswan, a law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, in an email.

California law requires the state's cap-and-trade regulations to ensure that emissions reductions are “real, permanent, quantifiable, verifiable" and “in addition to any other greenhouse gas emission reduction that otherwise would occur."

“If there's new scientific information that suggests serious questions about the integrity of offsets, then, arguably, CARB has an ongoing duty to consider that information and revise their protocols accordingly," Kaswan said. “The agency's obligation is to implement the law, and the law requires additionality."

The Recipe

On an early spring day, Lautzenheiser, the Audubon scientist, brought a reporter to a forest protected by the offset project. The trees here were mainly tall white pines mixed with hemlocks, maples and oaks. Lautzenheiser is usually the only human in this part of the woods, where he spends hours looking for rare plants or surveying stream salamanders.

The nonprofit's planning documents acknowledge that the forests enrolled in California's program were protected long before they began generating offsets: “A majority of the project area has been conserved and designated as high conservation value forest for many years with deliberate management focused on long-term natural resource conservation values."

Lautzenheiser said there's no contradiction between active forest management and conservation, as Mass Audubon routinely logs some of its land to maintain crucial habitat.

Forests, wetlands and other ecosystems that store carbon are being destroyed every day, and “we simply have no chance" of meeting necessary climate targets without maintaining and restoring these lands, he said in an email. The world needs to scale up these types of “natural climate solutions," he said, and “we need them now."

When asked about Mass Audubon's logging scenario, he said the numbers were modeled by Finite Carbon, an offsets project developer that handled most of the technical work. There are legitimate discussions about how to set a floor, Lautzenheiser said, and the board settled on “a fair standard." Finite Carbon was just following “the recipe" laid out by the Air Resources Board, he said.

Finite Carbon, which oil giant BP acquired a majority stake in late last year, did not respond to specific questions about the project. In a statement, the company said all of its projects “have undergone review by the ARB as well as an independent, ARB-accredited auditor to ensure full compliance with Board protocols."

Energy company Phillips 66 bought 500,000 of the credits from Mass Audubon's project, while Shell and the Southern California Gas Company acquired another 140,000, according to the latest data from the board.

Researchers said the board must do a better job of evaluating whether projects are truly benefiting the climate.

Mark Trexler, a former offset project developer who spent decades studying additionality, said the Air Resources Board needs to scrutinize its projects to determine whether all the credits are truly additional and, if not, how many dubious credits were issued.

“Unless you have an answer to that question, you have no business implementing" a program, he said.

Barbara Haya, a coauthor of the CarbonPlan study, said the state's approach could work, but must be closely monitored.

If the approach leads to some projects with too many credits and others with too few, then the system should balance out, preventing additional emissions, said Haya, who leads the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, Berkeley.

“What matters is the quality of the credits as a whole, not every single individual credit," she said.

The board, however, hasn't provided this kind of assessment and doesn't accept the premise that any of its credits might not be additional.

Mortgaging the Atmosphere

Conservation groups stress that offset programs have helped to create financial incentives to protect forests, and have provided funding that some have used to purchase and preserve additional land that might otherwise have been logged.

John Nickerson, a consultant at Climate Action Reserve, a nonprofit that helped to develop California's offset rules, said landowners face financial pressure to log or develop their land. The average forest owner holds on to their property for 20 years before selling it; without offsets, he noted, trees are only valued for their timber. “You take away this and we're back to fighting timber wars," he said.

“The risk for which projects are credited is real," Nickerson said.

But even if some landowners are using the offsets proceeds to acquire more land, the carbon math still needs to balance out across the whole system to ensure it's not producing more emissions than it's preventing.

“I think what's happening is a lot of these organizations are mortgaging the atmosphere to accomplish conservation goals," said Grayson Badgley, a postdoctoral fellow at Black Rock Forest and Columbia University, and the lead researcher on the CarbonPlan study. “It's totally true that they need money," he said, and “they've convinced themselves that the only way they can get the money is through offsets."

But, he continued, “by pretending they're working, we're locking ourselves in this Faustian bargain," in which California achieves conservation goals at the cost of climate ones.

Other researchers have also spotted signs that credits might be going to projects that weren't likely to be aggressively logged.

A 2016 paper pointed out that many of the early participants in California's forest offset program were conservation nonprofits. Their carbon-rich forests were already well above the program's floors and thus well-suited to earn a large number of credits.

While the state program may provide funds to these groups that could help them acquire new land, it's not likely that the offsets were changing practices in the forests they enrolled, the study concluded.

“It is an additionality problem," said Erin Kelly, an associate professor of forest policy and administration at Humboldt State University and lead author of the 2016 paper.

'Willful Blindness'

Industry insiders said landowners could theoretically log to levels far below the floor set by the board, so it's no surprise that many submit proposals that maximize the amount of logging they could be doing.

“I'm sure that these sophisticated project developers set up their modeling systems to run iterations until they can accomplish just that," Nickerson said with a laugh.

For a handful of projects, the documents state this outright, Badgley found. That includes one in Wisconsin where developer Bluesource wrote in its paperwork that it used software to model numerous logging levels for every acre of the project until it found a combination that produced carbon levels “equal" to the floor set by the board.

Emily Six, the marketing and communications manager for Bluesource, confirmed in an email that the company uses modeling and optimization software to arrive at these results. But she disputed that this exaggerates potential logging levels, noting that even if a landowner hadn't planned to log aggressively, “a spike in timber prices or mounting economic pressures" could change their minds “at any point over the 100-year project timeframe."

Trexler, the former project developer, said that line of reasoning is “absurd." The credibility of any logging plan depends on current conditions and intentions, not what might happen decades later, he said.

Trexler has despaired over what he called a “willful blindness" to this fundamental problem. Like an offsets Cassandra, he's repeatedly issued warnings on how false savings threaten the integrity of offsets everywhere.

Without better assurances that credits represent carbon savings that wouldn't have happened otherwise, “all we're doing is creating a massive market for creative accounting," he said.

Years ago, Trexler proposed a scoring system to distinguish high-quality offsets — those with a high likelihood of achieving real climate benefits — from lower-quality projects, to improve transparency in the carbon market. But the concept never took off, he said. He no longer works on offset programs.

“I've sort of checked out," he said. “I've simply concluded we're never going to do it well."

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This climate 'solution' is actually adding millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere

by Lisa Song, ProPublica, and James Temple, MIT Technology Review

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Along the coast of Northern California near the Oregon border, the cool, moist air off the Pacific sustains a strip of temperate rainforests. Soaring redwoods and Douglas firs dominate these thick, wet woodlands, creating a canopy hundreds of feet high.

But if you travel inland the mix of trees gradually shifts.

Beyond the crest of the Klamath Mountains, you descend into an evergreen medley of sugar pines, incense cedars and still more Douglas firs. As you continue into the Cascade Range, you pass through sparser forests dominated by Ponderosa pines. These tall, slender trees with prickly cones thrive in the hotter, drier conditions on the eastern side of the state.

All trees consume carbon dioxide, releasing the oxygen and storing the carbon in their trunks, branches and roots. Every ton of carbon sequestered in a living tree is a ton that isn't contributing to climate change. And that thick coastal forest can easily store twice as much carbon per acre as the trees deeper inland.

This math is crucial to determining the success of California's forest offset program, which seeks to reduce carbon emissions by preserving trees. The state established the program a decade ago as part of its efforts to combat climate change.

But ecology is messy. The boundaries between forest types are nebulous, and the actual amount of carbon on any given acre depends on local climate conditions, conservation efforts, logging history and more.

California's top climate regulator, the Air Resources Board, glossed over much of this complexity in implementing the state's program. The agency established fixed boundaries around giant regions, boiling down the carbon stored in a wide mix of tree species into simplified, regional averages.

That decision has generated tens of millions of carbon credits with dubious climate value, according to a new analysis by CarbonPlan, a San Francisco nonprofit that analyzes the scientific integrity of carbon removal efforts.

The offset program allows forest owners across the country to earn credits for taking care of their land in ways that store or absorb more carbon, such as reducing logging or thinning out smaller trees and brush to allow for increased overall growth. Each credit represents one metric ton of CO2. Landowners can sell the credits to major polluters in California, typically oil companies and other businesses that want to emit more carbon than otherwise allowed under state law. Each extra ton of carbon emitted by industry is balanced out by an extra ton stored in the forest, allowing net emissions to stay within a cap set by the state.

As of last fall, the program had produced some six dozen projects that had generated more than 130 million credits, worth $1.8 billion at recent prices.

While calculating the exact amount of carbon saved by preserving forests is complicated, California's logic for awarding credits is relatively straightforward.

The Air Resources Board establishes the average amount of carbon per acre stored in a few forest types spanning large regions of the United States. If you own land that contains more carbon than the regional average, based on a survey of trees on your site, you can get credits for the difference. For example, if your land holds the equivalent of 100 tons of CO2 per acre, and the regional average is 40 tons, you can earn credits for saving 60 tons per acre. (This story will refer to each ton of CO2-equivalent as a ton of “carbon.") You must also commit to maintaining your forest's high carbon storage for the next 100 years.

These regional averages are meant to represent carbon levels in typical private forests. But the averages are determined from such large areas and such diverse forest types that they can differ dramatically from the carbon stored on lands selected for projects.

Project forests that significantly exceed these averages are frequently earning far more credits than the actual carbon benefits they deliver, CarbonPlan found.

This design also incentivizes the developers who initiate and lead these projects to specifically look for forest tracts where carbon levels stand out above these averages — either due to the site's location within a region, its combination of tree species, or both.

CarbonPlan estimates the state's program has generated between 20 million and 39 million credits that don't achieve real climate benefits. They are, in effect, ghost credits that didn't preserve additional carbon in forests but did allow polluters to emit far more CO2, equal to the annual emissions of 8.5 million cars at the high end.

Those ghost credits represent nearly one in three credits issued through California's primary forest offset program, highlighting systemic flaws in the rules and suggesting widespread gaming of the market.

“Our work shows that California's forest offsets program increases greenhouse gas emissions, despite being a large part of the state's strategy for reducing climate pollution," said Danny Cullenward, the policy director at CarbonPlan. “The program creates the false appearance of progress when in fact it makes the climate problem worse."

The Air Resources Board defended the program and disputed the central thesis of the study.

“We disagree with your statement that landowners or project developers are gaming the system or that there are inflated estimates" of greenhouse gas reductions, Dave Clegern, a spokesperson for the Air Resources Board, said in an email. Each version of the offset rules “went through our robust public regulatory review process," with input from the forestry industry, academia, government agencies and nonprofits, he added.

California's forest offset program is the largest in the country that is government-regulated. Other forest offset programs are voluntary, allowing businesses or individuals to purchase credits to shrink their environmental footprint.

CarbonPlan's study comes days after the Washington state legislature moved a cap-and-trade bill with an offset program to the governor's desk for approval. Oregon has also debated in recent months establishing a carbon market program that would emulate California's policy. In Washington, D.C., the Biden administration has signaled growing interest in harnessing forests and soil to draw down CO2. Businesses, too, increasingly plan to rely heavily on trees to offset their emissions in lieu of the harder task of cutting corporate pollution.

Forest offsets have been criticized for a variety of problems, including the risks that the carbon reductions will be short-lived, that carbon savings will be wiped out by increased logging elsewhere, and that the projects are preserving forests never in jeopardy of being chopped down, producing credits that don't reflect real-world changes in carbon levels.

But CarbonPlan's analysis highlights a different issue, one interlinked with these other problems. Even if everything else about a project were perfect, developers would still be able to undermine the program by exploiting regional averages.

Every time a polluter uses a credit that didn't actually save a ton of carbon, the total amount of emissions goes up.

Far from addressing climate change, California's forest offsets appear to be adding tens of millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere on balance, undermining progress on the state's long-term emissions goals.

“When you strip away all the jargon, you're left with a faulty set of assumptions that leave the door wide open to issuing meaningless offset credits," said Grayson Badgley, a postdoctoral fellow at Black Rock Forest and Columbia University, and the lead researcher on the study.

Cherry-Picking

CarbonPlan provided ProPublica and MIT Technology Review full and exclusive access to their analysis as it was being finalized. As part of that process, the news organizations sent the report to independent experts for review. The organizations also interviewed landowners, industry players and scientists and reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, including the project plans submitted by developers. CarbonPlan collaborated on the study with academic experts from the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University and other institutions.

The study itself wasn't designed to assess whether developers or landowners are intentionally cherry-picking sites that stand out from regional averages, stating only that the system “allows for" developers to select such land. But the researchers themselves say that the level of excess crediting and the clustering of projects in certain areas suggest that industry players have gamed the system.

One form of cherry-picking identified by the researchers involves geographic boundaries. In the case of Northern California, the state's offset program established a dividing line that separates that coastal strip of redwoods and Douglas firs from an inland region that spans more than 28,000 square miles.

The board's rules state that tall mixed-conifer forests in the coastal region store an average of 205 tons of carbon per acre. For the neighboring inland region, the agency set the corresponding regional average at 122 tons per acre. The figure is lower because it includes more trees with less carbon, such as Ponderosa pines, which dominate the eastern end of the inland region and are all but absent on the coast.

But where the two regions meet, the forest on either side is virtually identical in many places, storing similar amounts of carbon. That means a project developer can earn far more money by choosing a site just east of the border, simply because they can compare the carbon in their forest against a lower regional average. For instance, maintaining a 10,000-acre forest of coastal redwoods and Douglas firs with carbon levels of 200 tons per acre could earn zero credits west of the line, or 624,000 credits east of it. The choice is between no money and more than $8 million.

To claim the most credits possible, for the full difference between the carbon on their land and the regional averages, developers or landowners must show that it's legally and financially feasible to log down to those regional averages. The averages are effectively a stand-in for the way that similar forests are typically managed in an area.

A dozen projects are located in Northern California, almost entirely lined up along the western edge of the inland zone where the carbon-rich trees are juxtaposed against the lower regional average.

“What we're seeing is developers are taking advantage of the fact that the big stuff and the scrubby stuff have been averaged together," Badgley said.

Once an offset project developer and landowner decide to work together, the developer will generally shepherd them through the process in exchange for a fee or share of the sales of the credits generated — an arrangement that can be worth millions of dollars.

One of the most prolific project developers in the California system is an Australia-based timberlands investment company called New Forests. The company and its affiliates have worked on eight projects located almost entirely along the advantageous side of the border, as well as six elsewhere. CarbonPlan, in a separate analysis done for the news organizations that wasn't included in the study, found that nearly all earned dubious credits, adding up to as much as $176 million worth.

A large share of those credits came from a single project outside California that profited from a glaring mistake in the rules. New Forests' affiliate, Forest Carbon Partners, helped the Mescalero Apache Tribe develop a forest offset project in New Mexico. The project earned 3.7 million credits worth more than $50 million, largely because it was located in an area where the Air Resources Board had set an erroneously low regional average.

Another form of cherry-picking involves tree species: Developers can seek out tracts with particular trees that store far more carbon than the surrounding region.

According to the study, one project in Alaska consists almost entirely of giant Sitka spruces, yet the local regional average was calculated from a wide mix of trees, including species like cottonwoods that store far less carbon. The project earned significantly more credits than it should have due to the flaws in the system, the study said. The project owner didn't return requests for comment.

Preserving especially carbon-rich forests is good for the climate, in and of itself. But when the trees in the project area bear little resemblance to the types of trees that went into calculating the regional average, it exaggerates the number of credits at stake, CarbonPlan's study found.

Mark Trexler, a former offsets developer who worked in earlier U.S. and European carbon markets, said the board should have anticipated the perverse incentives created by its program.

“When people write offset rules, they always ignore the fact that there are 1,000 smart people next door that will try to game them," he said. Since the board set up a system that “incentivizes people to find the areas that are high-density, or high-carbon, that's what they're going to do."

To estimate the extent of overcrediting in California's program, CarbonPlan calculated its own version of regional averages for each project. The researchers drew on the same raw data used by the Air Resources Board, but only used data from tree species that more closely resemble the particular mix of trees in each project area.

In total, 74 such projects had been established as of September 2020, when CarbonPlan began its research. CarbonPlan was able to study 65 projects that had enough documentation to make analysis possible. All received credits for holding more carbon than the regional average.

The researchers found that the vast majority of projects were over-credited, but about a dozen would have received more credits under CarbonPlan's formula. Those included two New Forests projects, which would have earned as much as an additional 165,000 credits.

The news organizations sent officials at the Air Resources Board a copy of the study and its detailed methodology weeks before publication. Clegern declined multiple requests to interview board staff and responded only in writing.

He did not address CarbonPlan's calculations. “We were not given sufficient time to fully analyze an unpublished study and are not commenting further on the authors' alternative methodology," he wrote.

The outside scientists who reviewed the research on behalf of ProPublica and MIT Technology Review praised the study.

“It's a really analytically robust paper and it answers a really important policy question," said Daniel Sanchez, who runs the Carbon Removal Laboratory at UC-Berkeley. While close observers are well aware of numerous problems with California's forest offset rules, “they're revealing a deeper set of serious methodological flaws," he said.

None of the reviewers pointed out any major technical or conceptual flaws with the paper, which has been submitted to a journal for peer review.

'A Significant New Commodity Market'

In early 2015, an offsets nonprofit hosted a webinar highlighting how Native American tribes could participate in California's program.

One speaker was Brian Shillinglaw, a Stanford-trained lawyer and managing director at New Forests who oversees the company's U.S. forestry programs. The company manages the sale of carbon credits, sells timber and on behalf of investors manages more than 2 million acres of forests globally, a portfolio it values at more than $4 billion.

New Forests also manages its affiliate, Forest Carbon Partners, on behalf of an institutional investment client it declined to name. Forest Carbon Partners finances offset projects and shepherds landowners through the process of applying for California's offset program.

“The bottom line is the California carbon market has really created a significant new commodity market," Shillinglaw said during his presentation. He said the program is something “many Native American tribes are very well situated to benefit from, in part due to past conservative stewardship of their forests, which can lead to significant credit yield in the near term."

Translation: Because many tribes have logged less aggressively than their neighbors, their carbon-rich forests were primed for big payouts of credits. Under Shillinglaw, New Forests or Forest Carbon Partners have helped to secure tens of millions of dollars' worth of credits for native tribes.

Among the 13 New Forests projects that CarbonPlan researchers were able to analyze, between 33% and 71% of the credits don't represent real carbon reductions. That's nearly 13 million credits at the high end.

“Although we cannot prove that New Forests acted deliberately on the basis of our statistical analysis, in our judgment there is no reasonable explanation for these outcomes other than that New Forests knowingly engaged in cherry-picking behavior to take advantage of ecological shortcomings in the forest offset protocol," said Badgley, the lead researcher.

New Forests managed the first official project in California's program, registering 7,660 acres of forest land on or near the Yurok Reservation, which runs more than 40 miles along the Klamath River near the top of that West Coast cluster of projects. The state issued more than 700,000 credits to the project for its first year, worth $9.6 million at recent rates.

State officials have pointed to the tribe's participation as a triumph of the program. In 2014, the board released a promotional video that showed the meticulous work of measuring trees in the Yurok project. James Erler, the tribe's then-forestry director, explained how offsets enabled the tribe to reduce logging. Near the end of the video, Shillinglaw appears in a sunlit forest, wearing a collared shirt and a New Forests-branded jacket.

“It's a beautiful watershed," Shillinglaw said over footage of a running stream and an elk standing before a thicket of trees. “This is the Yurok Tribe's ancestral homeland, and in part due to the carbon market will be managed through a conservation approach."

CarbonPlan estimates the project earned more than half a million ghost credits worth nearly $6.5 million.

Here's why the researchers say it was over credited:

The boundary dividing California's coastal and inland regions runs through the middle of the reservation. The carbon-rich forests on either side of that line are similar, filled with large Douglas firs like most of the coastal region. But more than 99% of the forest designated for preservation falls within the inland zone, where average carbon levels are much lower. The fact that the project was located in the most carbon-rich area of that zone enabled the landowners to earn an exaggerated number of credits.

At least one person involved in the Yurok Tribe's forest offset efforts was aware of how geographical choices swing the credits that can be earned.

Erler said during a 2015 presentation at a National Indian Timber Symposium that the tribe had the “distinct pleasure" of having the boundary run through its territory.

“You can take the same inventory data and apply it to the California Coast" — the region to the west — “and it doesn't come out with the same numbers as you do if you cross the street," Erler said at the conference, captured in a YouTube video posted to the Intertribal Timber Council's channel. “Vegetation may be the same, but it changes."

Badgley said that while the researchers can't speak to the intentions of any actors involved, it's clear that this project “benefited from over-crediting and that the Yurok Tribe's forester was aware how the specific aspects of the protocol rules our study criticizes led to beneficial outcomes."

Erler didn't respond to a list of emailed questions.

In an emailed statement, Yurok spokesperson Matt Mais said that the property was the only land the tribe had available to enroll at the time and strongly denied the tribe engaged in any sort of gaming of the system. He didn't respond before press time to a subsequent inquiry asking why the rest of the tribe's land wasn't available for the offset program.

Over the last decade or so, the tribe has slowly reacquired tens of thousands of acres of its ancestral territory, in and around the watershed of Blue Creek and other streams that sustain migrating salmon, from the Green Diamond Resource Company, a major Seattle-based timber business. The complex multistep land deals were done in partnership with the nonprofit Western Rivers Conservancy and financed through government grants, philanthropic donations and the sale of the tribe's offset credits.

“As we have recovered additional forestlands, we have enrolled additional acreage in California's climate programs in support of our Tribe's strategic goals including protecting salmon habitat, sustaining the revitalization of our cultural lifeways, and facilitating economic self-sufficiency," Mais wrote.

“It's insulting to claim that the Yurok Tribe has 'gamed' or 'exploited' California's climate regulations," he added. “Equally important, it's concerning that elite institutions now criticize us for legally and ethically using a program that was created to protect mature forests and then using those funds to purchase and restore more forest land that was, at one point, ours."

New Forests defended its practices in emailed responses to questions, arguing its projects have preserved existing carbon stocks and removed CO2 from the atmosphere through subsequent tree growth “as confirmed via third-party verification."

In a statement, the company said it has worked on projects in numerous areas, not just along the program's regional boundaries. The company said its projects “have protected and will enhance carbon storage on hundreds of thousands of acres of forests," adding that one project with the Chugach Alaska Corporation enabled the permanent retirement of a significant portion of the coal reserves in the Bering River Coal Field in southeastern Alaska.

New Forests follows the board's “scientifically-accepted regulations to both the spirit and letter of the program," the company said in a subsequent statement. “New Forests is proud of the forest carbon projects we have developed under California's climate programs — they have generated positive environmental impact and furthered the economic and cultural objectives of the family forest landowners and Native American tribes with whom we have worked."

New Forests didn't respond to numerous additional inquiries, including direct questions about whether it was gaming the rules of the program.

In an emailed response, CarbonPlan stressed that its paper criticizes the design of the program — not the Yurok Tribe or other landowners. Nor does it allege anyone has broken the rules. Its analysis doesn't consider or depend on the intent of any forest owners, who can benefit from flaws in the rules whether they intended to or even know about them.

“We recognize the injustices experienced by the Yurok Tribe, including the seizure of their historical lands by the United States government and its citizens," the nonprofit stated. “We also recognize the Yurok Tribe's legitimate interest in securing resources to repurchase lands that previously belonged to the Tribe and its people."

An Open Secret

Chris Field, an environmental studies professor at Stanford University, was co-author of a 2017 study that found California's program was helping to prevent emissions on balance by reducing logging. About 64% of the 39 projects studied were “being actively logged at or prior to project inception."

Field said the state program is “relatively well-designed to address key issues," but said it can and should be improved.

He added that there are firm limits on the role that offsets can play in California. From now through 2025, state polluters can only buy offsets to cover as much as 4% of their carbon emissions; from 2026 to 2030, that ceiling rises to 6%.

But those numbers understate the critical role of offsets in California's cap-and-trade program, viewed by some as a model for market-based climate policy.

Under that program, California sells permits that allow certain industries to emit greenhouse gases, with each permit worth one metric ton of CO2. The state also regularly gives away a certain number of permits to various regulated companies. The total number of permits, called a “cap," declines over time.

Polluters can also purchase permits from other companies with extras to spare, which constitutes the “trade." Or they can buy carbon offset credits, which cost slightly less than permits.

To participate in the offset program, landowners must hire technicians to survey the trees on their land, then take data such as tree type, height and diameter and plug it into equations to estimate the carbon stored per acre.

Most of the credits are distributed during the initial stages of a project, which can help to repay setup costs. Projects can also earn additional credits over time as the trees grow and absorb CO2, but those credits accrue slowly, and are dwarfed by the initial credits given to forests with more carbon than the regional average.

The type of forest projects that CarbonPlan analyzed account for 68% of all credits issued by the Air Resources Board since the program's launch, far eclipsing other types of offsets like capturing methane from dairy farms or coal mines, CarbonPlan found.

Cap and trade is designed to slash the state's carbon footprint by 236 million tons of CO2 over the next decade, about a third of the cumulative reductions needed to meet the state's emissions targets over that time.

Barbara Haya, who leads the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at UC-Berkeley and is a co-author of the CarbonPlan study, calculated that up to half of those cap-and-trade emissions cuts could come via offsets.

Haya said these cherry-picking practices have been an open secret. The study is “revealing to everyone what a lot of people in the industry understand," she said.

Conservation vs. the Climate

Supporters of forest offsets say no system is perfect, and that focusing solely on the carbon math overlooks the incentives offsets create for protecting forests.

Field said offset systems should balance two goals: ensuring real emissions cuts, and creating ways to fund forest conservation. If CarbonPlan's study shows projects are gravitating toward high-carbon forests, then those are exactly the types of trees you'd want to save “if you have a conservation agenda," he said.

Cody Desautel, president of the Intertribal Timber Council, a Portland-based nonprofit consortium of native tribes, said that offset programs have provided critical financial flexibility for tribes. They've allowed them to buy back historic land, build needed infrastructure, create jobs for members or simply save up money for financial security. But above all, they've created incentives to manage forests in sustainable ways, he said.

“Tribes are very conservation-minded," said Desautel, who is also the natural resources director for Washington's Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which operate an offset project under California's system. “Their practices are largely based on what's best for the ecosystem, not what makes the most sense economically. And there's never been any value to that management approach in the past. These carbon projects provide an opportunity to value that."

He added, “If there's no value to owning forest land, it probably won't be forest land long into the future."

The Yurok Tribe's offset projects have clearly helped in these sorts of ways, even if they didn't provide the full promised carbon benefit.

The tribe has said it is using the acquired land and funds to restore its old-growth forests, produce traditional foods and basket-weaving materials, create a salmon sanctuary and improve habitat for endangered or culturally important species like the coho salmon, northern spotted owl, blacktailed deer and Roosevelt elk.

“Our partnership with New Forests will provide the Tribe with the means to boost biodiversity, accelerate watershed restoration, and increase the abundance of important cultural resources like acorns, huckleberry and hundreds of medicinal plants that thrive in a fully functioning forest ecosystem," Thomas P. O'Rourke Sr., then-chairman of the Yurok Tribal Council, said in a statement at the time.

But if the societal goal is preserving forests, it would be simpler and more effective to describe it accurately and fund it directly, said Haya, the UC-Berkeley expert. As soon as these forests get tied up in an offset program, the carbon math does matter, because every additional ton purportedly preserved in trees enables polluters to purchase the right to generate an additional ton of CO2.

Forest offsets appeal to the public partly because of what academics call “charismatic carbon" — they offer a feel-good story of environmental and social good.

“Any good conservation advocate would tell you there's a desperate need for more funding, and we agree entirely," CarbonPlan's Cullenward said in an email. The “problem isn't that conservation is bad, it's that the system of carbon offsets channels these real needs and sincere hopes into a system that grinds it all up and spits out garbage on the other side."

“The Best Bang for the Buck"

California's Air Resources Board approved the forest offset program's official rules in 2011, after years of discussions with dozens of experts, including government scientists and staff from conservation groups.

In adopting it, the agency relied heavily on Climate Action Reserve, a nonprofit that created programs with voluntary offset credits. The nonprofit, which continues to advise the agency, led an effort to calculate regional carbon averages as part of an initiative to update its voluntary offset rules.

To do so, the nonprofit used data from the U.S. Forest Service, which surveys tens of thousands of forest plots nationwide. The nonprofit grouped data from different tree species and combined data from various geographic zones into larger regional areas called supersections. This simplification allowed the Climate Action Reserve to create a set of common baselines that estimated the amount of carbon stored in typical privately owned forests. The baselines take into account such forest uses as logging.

But the use of these broad averages obscured real differences on the ground. Some industry insiders and researchers began to notice that landowners and developers routinely located their projects in areas where the specific tract of forest differed greatly from the regional averages.

Zack Parisa, chief executive of the carbon offsets company SilviaTerra, previously consulted for project developers and landowners enrolling forests in California's system. But he said he stopped out of frustration, after seeing the ways it was regularly being gamed, including the cherry-picking techniques CarbonPlan highlighted.

Parisa said he doesn't blame landowners or project developers, who are acting out of rational self-interest.

“If someone shows up and is offering a contract to buy carbon and it doesn't require them to change anything about how they manage the forests, that's free money and they'd be stupid not to take it," he said.

“I'm not hunting for a villain here," Parisa added. “Of course they look for the best bang for the buck."

In addition to New Forests, other developers also worked on projects where favorable boundaries and forest types boosted the credits that could be earned, according to CarbonPlan. Those include Bluesource and Finite Carbon, which BP purchased a majority stake in late last year. The researchers found that those two developers' projects, taken together, generated up to 24 million credits that don't represent actual carbon reductions.

New Forests, Finite Carbon, Bluesource and other subjects of this article were provided the full study and an accompanying paper describing its methods.

Finite Carbon declined to address detailed questions, but stressed that the Air Resources Board and an independent auditor found that their projects were in compliance with the rules.

In a statement, the company said there were “unanswered questions" about the CarbonPlan study's methodology, adding, “however we cannot comment further on it as the underlying raw data is not currently available for public review."

Emily Six, the marketing and communications manager for Bluesource, denied the company had gamed the rules in any way.

In an email, Six said California's program actually undercounts the carbon preserved through projects by not crediting the amount stored in other parts of the forest like soil, shrubs and foliage. She also stressed that without offsets, some landowners could have chopped down their forests to carbon levels well below the regional average.

“Deliberately overstating climate benefits would run counter to our very purpose for existence," she wrote. “Bluesource exists to improve the world by improving the environment."

The experts who wrote the original offset rules relied on the only national forest dataset available, from the U.S. Forest Service's Forest Inventory and Analysis Program, said Constance Best, co-founder of the Pacific Forest Trust. The conservation nonprofit was closely involved in the creation of the early program and participated in it.

Best said it was necessary to create carbon averages for larger regions and forest types because there wasn't enough fine-grained data to ensure accuracy at highly local levels. She disputed CarbonPlan's claim that its researchers had created a better way of calculating regional averages, since their method required relying on a smaller number of forest plots.

“The reason some super sections are large is to assure the data is more accurate," Best said in an email. “So their solution creates more problems."

In a separate note, she said: “The paper you shared has a strong editorial bias that undermines its findings and makes me question their data and analysis. It deliberately exaggerates what they present as smoking gun over-credited projects."

In an emailed statement, CarbonPlan acknowledges that using fewer forest plots entails some uncertainty. But the researchers stressed they clearly accounted for it by providing a range of results, and maintained their findings are more accurate because they considered the specific mix of tree species in each project. CarbonPlan also shot back at the allegation of bias: “Having done our work on the basis of extensive public program records, and with fully reproducible methods, data, and code, we are confident that other researchers are capable of judging our paper on its merits."

While the board has updated regional averages based on more recent forest data, critics say efforts to address more fundamental problems have been thwarted.

Researchers and activists also worry about the close ties between the Air Resources Board and the groups that now profit from the program.

For example, whenever a landowner wants to enroll a forest tract in California's program, they open an account at Climate Action Reserve or two other nonprofits that have received the board's blessing to review the documents.

If the project clears the Climate Action Reserve's review and a subsequent audit by the state board, the nonprofit charges 19 cents for every credit issued. For one of the largest projects in the program, for instance, that would have added up to more than $1 million.

It “strikes me as a massive conflict of interest for an organization — whether nonprofit or not — that designed the system to have a financial stake in its operation," David Victor, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has closely studied international offset systems, said in an email. (Victor recently co-authored the book “Making Climate Policy Work" with Cullenward.)

“In any other market, putting the market players in charge of key elements of its design would lead to 'hollers'" over the conflicts of interest, Victor said. With the forest offset program, “everyone seems fine or even happy about the arrangement."

Climate Action Reserve didn't respond to multiple requests for comment.

'Too Good to Be True'

Hardy, drought-tolerant softwoods like junipers and pinyon pines dominate in the hot, dry landscape of central New Mexico, with smatterings of taller Douglas firs and spruces in the cooler, higher reaches of the mountains.

But under the initial rules of California's program, those forests were considered to contain no carbon whatsoever.

The error stemmed from the fact that there was no available Forest Service data in that part of New Mexico when the Climate Action Reserve calculated regional averages, said Olaf Kuegler, a Forest Service statistician who provided technical assistance to the nonprofit on the federal database.

Consequently, the Climate Action Reserve set the regional average for an area stretching nearly 34,000 square miles at zero, which meant anyone who owned a few dozen trees could earn carbon credits.

Kuegler said he wasn't aware of the mistake until early or mid-2014, when Air Resources Board employee Barbara Bamberger asked him about it. Bamberger, who leads the board's work on forest offsets, later highlighted the error during an October 2014 webinar on offsets.

During her presentation, Bamberger said the board was updating the regional averages in ways that could lead to major changes in certain areas.

“This may be due to the fact that no data existed for some years in the original span from years 2002 to 2006," she explained. “For example, in New Mexico data wasn't collected until the end of that period."

Almost exactly one year after Bamberger's presentation, New Forests' affiliate filed the paperwork for a nearly 222,000-acre project in New Mexico, stretching across the Mescalero Apache Tribe's nearly half-million-acre reservation about ninety minutes west of Roswell. More than a third of the project's trees were carbon-rich Douglas firs, according to the project's paperwork. Shillinglaw signed the forms.

The erroneously low carbon calculation allowed the developer to claim they could have heavily logged the forest, boosting the amount of credits they could earn.

The project earned 3.7 million credits for its first year, worth more than $50 million.

When the California board's updated rules went into effect two weeks later, it set a far higher regional average for most of the project area. If that standard had been in place earlier, it would have eliminated nearly every credit the project earned, CarbonPlan found. The project generated more ghost credits than any other in the nonprofit's study, based on its more conservative calculations of regional carbon averages.

The Mescalero Apache Tribe's president at the time, Danny Breuninger Sr., said the tribe welcomed the project.

“None of us had heard about the carbon credit program, and in a way it sounded too good to be true," he said. “But it was a great deal. It worked out great for us."

Breuninger referred further questions to the tribe's current president, Gabe Aguilar. Neither Aguilar nor the tribe's attorney, Nelva Cervantes, responded to repeated inquiries.

In a statement, the Air Resources Board said the project met all the requirements of the program at that time. The fact that the board was in the process of developing new regional averages using data that didn't previously exist didn't make the earlier figures “invalid or erroneous," it added.

'A Second Wave of Colonization'

Ghost credits matter because they allow other companies to purchase the right to continue emitting real greenhouse gases.

Credits from the Mescalero Apache Tribe's project were sold to PG&E, Chevron and a company that drills for oil in Kern County, California, according to the latest figures available.

The Yurok Tribe's 7,660-acre project generated credits that were obtained by a variety of energy companies like Calpine, PG&E and Shell.

Some tribal members are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of selling offsets to companies like this even if they are legitimate, fearing they're effectively profiting from pollution.

The offsets, by definition, allow California companies to continue producing more CO2 than otherwise allowed — as well as the toxic pollutants like soot and heavy metals that frequently accompany such emissions — often near poor neighborhoods. Communities near refineries, cement kilns and power plants have frequently opposed offset programs.

Thomas Joseph, an activist and a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in California, said offset developers target tribal projects because tribes are in “dire need of revenue" and own vast tracts of mostly intact forest. He said his tribe has resisted multiple pitches from developers. “For us to use this as a means to allow corporations to continue to pollute," he said, goes “against our cultural values." He added, “I see it as a second wave of colonization."

Desautel, the Intertribal Timber Council president, sees it differently. When the issue comes up among tribal members, he explains that polluters under cap and trade need to pay either the state for permission to pollute, or landowners through carbon offsets.

“The check is getting written one way or the other," he said. “It's just a question of where it goes and what's being accomplished with that funding."

SilviaTerra's Parisa said that landowners and project developers will continue to respond to the incentives created in the program, in ways that overstate climate progress, until the program itself changes.

“We need better rules," he said. “Let's make sure the dollars we spend actually change things.

“Forests really can be a part of the solution for the climate, but we haven't gotten it right yet."

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