Discredited

Exhilarating depiction of the rise and fall of Green Street brokerage firm is a rush.

In the early 2030s, a troupe of executives from companies ranging from America Air to Musiqstreem posed for a photo beneath the emerald canopy of rainforest deep in the Brazilian Amazon. They were there to celebrate a decade of “carbon neutral” operations, made possible through their investments in the voluntary carbon market. Alongside them was a beaming Lili Stone-Blackwell, the founder and CEO of CarboNil, the company that had made it all possible. It had found renewable energy projects and forests to create and sell carbon credits to clients so that they could remove planet-heating emissions from their balance sheets.

But the forest was a facade. The trees growing there weren’t under threat and never had been, and the offsets issued in their name had failed to meet their promise of decarbonization. Despite the nifty accounting trick, global temperatures kept rising.

These execs weren’t the only ones duped. In CarboNil’s decade dominating the voluntary carbon market, global companies dished out more than $55 billion. They were heralded in the media for taking their emissions seriously, and Stone-Blackwell, once an idealistic whiz kid, quickly became the world’s most successful green-finance entrepreneur by selling what turned out to be an entirely ineffective solution.

Investigative journalists Samantha Parker and Zahra Khan chronicled Stone-Blackwell’s rollercoaster rise and downfall, from a freshly minted PhD with a new approach to quantifying the carbon-storing potential of forests to convicted fraudster. “Discredited,” which premium StreamFlix customers can watch now, is Nora Wood’s Hollywood adaptation of their book, and it is a white-knuckle, no-holds-barred, thrill-ride through Green Street’s murkiest tributaries. 

CarboNil, in case you’ve forgotten, was the Vancouver-based firm that ruled the UN-run global carbon offset system in the mid-20s and 30s. In less than a decade, CarboNil’s valuation soared to $18 billion from $5 million, with offices in two-dozen countries. It even launched a “blue carbon” cryptocurrency called Oceanum, intended to remove carbon credits from the market, thereby raising the price of carbon and boosting a company’s desire to reduce emissions. (It did not.) And then CarboNil collapsed like a soufflé. 

Daya Haas plays the now-disgraced carbon entrepreneur whose dishonesty triggered the beginning of the end of the global voluntary carbon market. Stone-Blackwell was 29 years old when she founded CarboNil, launching the brokerage in 2025, as part of the growing global offset market that emerged in response to the race to Net Zero. With new, albeit weak, rules in place, greenhouse gas emitters were desperate for ways to deduct megatonnes of planet-warming pollution from their carbon ledgers. Because companies found it cheaper to pay for offsets than invest in cutting emissions, the market ballooned to more than $50 billion by 2030.

Stone-Blackwell seems to have meant well, initially selling offsets tied to forested swaths under threat from farming, dams and other development. Later, she expanded to the verified buildout of new renewable energy projects in developing countries that had relied on coal or other fossil fuels to produce electricity. But she lost her way, and Parker and Khan pulled back the curtain on her largely make-believe company. 

“Discredited” opens with CarboNil teetering on the edge of catastrophe. The ever-confident Stone-Blackwell is chairing a hastily called meeting in the expansive glass-walled conference room overlooking downtown Vancouver to address the board’s concerns over Parker and Khan’s eviscerating reports. The skyscraper gleams, but below its solar-harvesting glazing, sea-level rise has chewed into the city’s boardwalks and townhomes and frayed its edges. A thicket of sweating protestors has gathered outside, demanding to know whether any carbon has been averted, when an electric-carcade of Interpol climate enforcement agents swoops in to make the arrest.

A year earlier, a whistleblower, a climate scientist working for CarboNil, slips Khan a tip: The company’s credits don’t really lead to emissions reductions — the prevented deforestation was overestimated five-to-tenfold and recently declassified satellite images show that some so-called protected areas had been destroyed. 

With a series of beautiful location shots, the movie follows the journalists’ investigation to uncover the wrong-doing. As CarboNil hosts a gala for the glitterati to celebrate the issue of its 10-billionth credit, Parker and Khan are hiking through never-threatened lush boreal forests that generated those offsets. They scuba dive along Iceland’s coastlines in search of carbon-slurping kelp forests, and find ragged, underperforming plantings. 

Stone-Blackwell’s decisions added a billion tonnes to the global carbon ledger in a decade. Yet, despite the steep consequences of CarboNil’s misdeeds, (spoiler alert) the movie ends on a positive note. The final scenes of the movie take viewers through a whirlwind of quick takes featuring the aftermath of the Stone-Blackwell trial—protests, politicians lauding new legislation, perp walks from executives across the sector. “Discredited” leaves viewers relieved that the fraud was exposed and contributed to momentum behind massive investments in electrification and energy storage. The film is more than a chronicle – it takes us inside the scandal that ended the era of financial inputs into fossil fuel projects. 

Hannah Hoag