On July 6, 2021, lightning ignited a fire in the Fremont-Winema National Forest of southern Oregon, in an area packed with dead trees from a mountain pine-beetle outbreak. Fueled by drought, the Bootleg fire exploded, at one point consuming 1,000 acres per hour. Flames pushed out of the national forest, racing through white fir, ponderosa, and lodgepole pine owned by timber company Green Diamond.
Hundreds of miles north, in a Seattle suburb, Elizabeth Willmott was tracking events closely. As the carbon program director for technology giant Microsoft, she had a special interest in Green Diamond’s Klamath East forests: They were storing some of her company’s carbon.
Microsoft has committed to one of the country’s most ambitious corporate carbon-cutting programs, aiming to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, not just for its own buildings and factories but also for its supply chains. But since curbing emissions outright will take years, Microsoft announced it was investing in a slate of projects that would pull 1.43 million tons of carbon dioxide from the sky. That included 265,000 tons of CO2 that Microsoft had paid Green Diamond to remove by increasing the growth of trees—many of which had just gone up in smoke in the Bootleg fire, returning their carbon to the atmosphere.
As companies face increasing public pressure to limit their climate impact, the global market for forest carbon “credits,” already worth billions of dollars, is booming. Polluting companies can…
