March 22, 2023
Bloomberg Green has won the Overseas Press Club’s Whitman Bassow Award for “Exploiting Carbon Offsets,” a series of reporting on carbon offset programs that have failed to deliver real climate benefits. The Whitman Bassow Award recognizes the best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues.
The award goes to Bloomberg’s Max De Haldevang, Akshat Rathi, Natasha White, Demetrios Pogkas, Verity Ratcliffe, Ben Elgin and Sinduja Rangarajan.
The OPC judges wrote, “The winning entry by Bloomberg Green took on the complex topic of carbon offsets, the system that allows companies to continue emitting their own greenhouse gases while paying others to reduce their emissions. The reporters analyzed more than 200,000 transactions to show how dozens of companies are using questionable accounting to claim ‘carbon neutral’ status, allowing them to erase tens of millions of tons of carbon from their books.”
Bloomberg also received two runner-up citations:
– Bloomberg Green won the Whitman Bassow runner-up citation for “Big Plastics.” The award goes to Bloomberg staff, including Kit Chellel, Wojciech Moskwa, Matthew Campbell, Ekow Dontoh, Leslie Kaufman, Stephanie Baker, Patpicha Tanakasempipat, K. Oanh Ha, and Rachael Dottle.
– Bloomberg News received a runner-up citation for “Black Snow: Nigeria’s Oil Catastrophe” in the OPC’s Morton Frank Award for best international business news reporting in TV, video, radio, audio or podcast. The award goes to Neville Gillett, Matt Goldman, Katharina Glanz, Leila Hussain, William Clowes, Rubab Shakir, and Simpa Sampson.
The 84th Annual OPC Awards dinner will take place on April 27 at Cipriani in New York City.
View the full list of winners here.