Fooling ourselves - the big one

Carbon offsets are a crock.

Buddy had a particular questioning glance, almost skeptical. I’d catch that look from him and quickly check to see if I was doing something stupid.

There’s lots of doublethink out there. We can use it to pretend we’re fighting climate change when we’re really not.

• A decade ago, I bragged about getting 57 miles per gallon on our Honda Hybrid, 40% better than the non-hybrid. What happened? Because we used less gas, we chose to drive more miles in the hybrid—about 40% above normal over those years. It’s called the rebound effect. I thought we were heroes, but our annual emissions never dropped.

• Our family also felt good about signing up to pay a tad more in our utility’s green energy program, the one that lets us “choose renewable energy for our electricity instead of the normal energy mix containing dirty fossil fuels!” What happened? We got a congratulatory letter and a different electric bill, but nobody actually remixed our electricity or built more solar panels or wind turbines.

• I and other alumni have been pushing our university to reduce the huge emissions its programs cause. The university produced a carbon-reduction plan relying heavily on carbon offsets. Six months ago, students began protesting the use of offsets, calling them “questionable at best” and “irresponsible and dangerous.”

  This week these negatives were expanded by a report exposing offsets as mostly tomfoolery.

The forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading certifier and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse, according to a new investigation. The research has found that more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions. [The Guardian et al]

WHAT ARE CARBON OFFSETS?

If a company or individual can’t or doesn’t want to reduce their carbon emissions they can buy offsets, or credits. The money is used to prevent a particular acreage of tropical forest from being cut down. And preventing rainforest from being cut is a good thing, since the forests are a big absorber of CO2. Other offsets are based on trees newly planted. Some even capture methane from landfills.

WHY THEY DON’T REALLY HELP

• The timing is wrong. A promise not to cut trees doesn’t reduce any emissions now. While we’re rapidly spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the protected rainforest is slowly absorbing the stuff. Those new trees we think are offsetting our activities? They’re growing very slowly.

• Offsets affect a tiny fraction of deforestation threats. It’s hard to get excited about saving thousands of acres of rainforest when it’s surrounded by millions of acres that can be destroyed any time.

• Offsets destroy incentives to do what we actually need. Companies think they’re buying them as Get-out-of-jail-free cards, that they can keep emitting as much as ever while claiming their offsets make their operations carbon neutral.

• As consumers, particularly as airline travelers, if we believe we’re buying from airlines that use offsets, we have less incentive to actually reduce our air travel or other carbon-intensive purchases.

ARE OFFSETS ACTUALLY A FRAUD?

Beyond the flaws in the concept of offsets, they apparently are widely, sometimes wildly, miscalculated. Most offsets are certified by Verra and Gold Standard. Apparently these organizations have been stretching the truth rather dramatically.

The report shows that these future forecasts have been overly pessimistic in terms of baseline deforestation rates, and hence have vastly overstated their climate benefits. Many of these projects may have brought benefits to biodiversity conservation and local communities, but the impacts on climate change on which they are premised are regrettably much weaker than hoped.

We want there to be more good credits that are really beneficial, and less scam credits. The problem with the carbon markets is that they’re a wild west, they’re unregulated. [The Guardian]

More-or-less useless concepts, with their practice jiggered to be deceitful! But, hey, they can make businesses that buy them and consumers who buy from those businesses feel we’re saving the planet.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

• Ignore offsets and push companies hard - protesting, lobbying - for real carbon reductions right now.

• If we see a product or service that touts its carbon offsets, write them a nasty letter saying we’re not buying what they sell. Be clear we’re not against their paying to prevent deforestation, just that we don’t consider they’re reducing the company’s emissions. Those need to actually drop.

• Support organizations that actually pay for the conservation of forests. (Here are some of them.) Money is definitely needed to reduce deforestation rates, which are staggering, and global warming has begun drying out big areas of the remaining tropical forests so that they store less carbon.

From the Brazilian Amazon to the Congo basin, the tropics lost 11.1m hectares of tree cover last year, including 3.75m ha of primary forest critical to limiting global heating and biodiversity loss. [Asia Research News]

Northern forests are also endangered.

Boreal forests, mainly in Russia, experienced a record loss in 2021 driven by the worst wildfire season in Siberia since records began, according to new data from the University of Maryland released via Global Forest Watch. [Angry Wolf Society]

When we see a carbon offset, we should think of Buddy’s questioning glance and stop fooling ourselves.