The carbon market paradox: Steve Zwick on why financing forests is more complicated than it looks

Carbon markets sit at the awkward junction of science, finance, and politics, where the appetite for simple stories collides with a system built on probabilities. Few reporters have spent more time in that junction than Steve Zwick. He came to climate through the trading pits of Chicago, where he watched how information asymmetries reward insiders and mislead the public. That early lesson became a through line in his journalism and in his current work dissecting forest carbon and REDD+, the mechanism meant to make standing forests more valuable than felled ones. “The great tragedy of climate finance,” he has said, “is that those who understand it most have their noses to the grindstone, while those who understand it least have their mouths to the megaphone.” Zwick’s route was circuitous bu