Are Carbon Offsets Good? This Band-aid Solution Is Failing

I want to believe in the power of carbon offsets but the real world evidence against them is too much to ignore. In theory, carbon offsets should keep the carbon emissions at the same level for those that choose to purchase offsets. But even if every person and business used carbon offsets, our greenhouse gas emissions would still not be reduced. They would merely stay the same.

The whole point of carbon offsets is flawed. Offsets are purchased in the exact quantity that would make the emissions created elsewhere to cancel out. But what about the overload of carbon and other greenhouse gases that already exist? How are we planning to remove them?

There are fundamental issues with the concept of carbon offsets.

1. They are used as an obligatory way to make it OK to continue with greenhouse gas emitting activities.
2. It is next to impossible to quantify the carbon offset project’s ability to remove carbon and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
3. Offset projects have a reputation of being monetarily and bureaucratically driven and sometimes not making it to the point of actually removing greenhouse gases.
4. Offset projects have been known to exploit groups of people living in third world countries by claiming land for protection.
5. In some industries, it is too tempting to purposely cause an increase of emissions in order to get paid to offset them.
6. Offsets are often a cheaper way to achieve carbon targets over making the changes required to reduce carbon emissions.

Ideally, every person and industry should first take action to reduce their carbon footprint drastically. After that, carbon offsets could be considered but selecting a project to invest in is not an easy task. Let’s take a look at the problems with carbon offset projects historically and why it is a tricky concept moving forward as well.

What Are Carbon Offsets?

Carbon offsets are credits people and companies can purchase that will fund projects around the world focused on removing carbon and other greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in order to compensate for their own emissions. The idea of the carbon offset is to purchase a credit so that an equal amount of carbon and other greenhouse gases can be removed from the atmosphere as the amount that are emitted into the atmosphere elsewhere.

Carbon offsets can exist for carbon reduction rules at a regional, national or international level. In this case, businesses are held accountable to reduce their emissions to a level set in the compliance scheme. Carbon offsets can be used as a way to compensate for emissions to meet their legal obligatory goals.

Alternatively, carbon offsets are purchased as voluntary programs. People who want to offset the emissions from a flight or their lifestyle carbon footprint can use carbon offsets. Or companies might voluntarily purchase offsets to compensate for the emissions directly caused through the business or to appeal to a market who would choose their product because of their green initiatives.

Offsets are measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2e). Various gases have a significantly different affect on warming the atmosphere. One pound of nitrous oxide (N2O) impacts atmospheric warming 300 times more than carbon dioxide (CO2). So releasing one tonne of N2O is equivalent of almost 300 tonnes of CO2. Similarly, methane is about 25 times more potent than CO2.

There are other gases that are far worse than even nitrous oxide but thanks to the Kyoto Protocol, we have managed to significantly reduce the emissions due to hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and perfluorocarbons (PFCs).

Carbon offset projects come in many different forms, the main types are:

• forest/land protection, afforestation, reforestation, avoided deforestation
• gas capture / industrial gas destruction projects
• renewable energy projects
• improvements for energy efficiency like fuel switching
• carbon sequestration projects
• cook stove projects

Forest and land protection projects include those projects that prevent deforestation from occurring as well as projects that plant new trees. Afforestation is the process of planting trees in an area that didn’t have trees on it previously. Reforestation is the process of planting native trees in an area that they once existed.

Forest projects count as a carbon offset projects because forests naturally remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the tree and soil. Different forests absorb carbon at different rates. An old growth forest will be significantly more efficient in removing carbon than a young forest. But the general rule of thumb is that 15 trees can absorb one tonne of carbon.

So it makes sense that we want to keep the trees we have and plant even more of them so they can remove carbon from the air. But keep reading to learn about the problem with forest projects as a carbon offset.

Industrial gas destruction projects are good, they remove the more dangerous gases like N2O as well as methane. People don’t often choose these as an offset because they aren’t as attractive as they don’t preserve nature.

One common application captures the methane emitted from a landfill. Open landfills are problematic because the as the organic materials within the landfill decompose they release methane gas (which has a higher greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide). This makes a good carbon offset project because it’s effectiveness can be measured. Plus landfill methane can be used as a fairly clean energy source for electricity or heat. This prevents fossil fuels to be used for that energy.

Carbon sequestration is the process of using plants and soils as carbon sinks. Modern biosequestration projects might also bring the benefit of reduced erosion, increased biodiversity and improved hydrological regulation. But there are problems with carbon sequestration as a carbon offset – more on that later.

Carbon Offset Standards

There are many amazing offset projects but even more bad ones. Thus a need for a carbon offset standard. Unfortunately there is not just one standard and it can be confusing to know which one to support the projects from.

Some of the main carbon offset standards for voluntary offsets include:

• Gold Standard (GS)
• Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)
• VER+
• Voluntary Offset Standard (VOS)

These groups have been formed to support offset projects that are believed to be most beneficial to removing carbon from the atmosphere. Not just in their efficiency to remove greenhouse gases but also to provide a fair solution for the people living in the area of the offset and accountability for the results.

Each standard is slightly different and accept different types of projects but some of the key elements are similar.

Additionality is the term used to describe a project that would not have happened if the carbon offset was not purchased. A project must pass a set of tests to determine whether the project would proceed “business as usual” if the offset credit was not purchased.

The Gold Standard comes out on top of the list of standards for their requirements of additionality tests. They are used for large and small scale projects.

Most carbon offset standards require the audit from a third party to verify the emissions reductions. And there should be a separation of the verification and approval process.

Most carbon offset standards include a registry. If the project is registered with a carbon offset registry, it is more likely to be sold only once and not double-counted. For example, Brazil wants to include preserving forests as part of their carbon offset count but also wants to sell that as an offset to earn money from other companies that will pay for the same thing.

Overall these standards have been beneficial in addressing the weaknesses in the carbon offset market and help some great projects. It has also been very beneficial in bringing carbon reduction actions to countries that were reluctant to create strong policies.

How Are Carbon Offsets Calculated?

There is a lot of guesswork that goes into calculating the amount of emissions reductions that offsetting projects reduce. Usually offsetting projects need to be heavily monitored and then audited by certified third parties. The problem with the “guesstimate” is that it needs to be compared to the carbon levels if the project had not happened – but when it is happening you can’t know for sure.

A study completed in 2016 by the European Commission found that 85 percent of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects had overestimated the calculated emissions reductions. The areas that were most problematic for the CDM projects involved additionality and setting baselines.

Calculating emissions reductions isn’t a perfect science at this point. The standards are important to highlight the weaknesses and the kinks are still being worked out.

Why Carbon Offsets Do NOT Work

Do carbon offsets make a difference? The answer is complicated. Some people believe that the benefits of carbon offsets outweigh the negatives. The number of offsets purchased each year continues to increase and it is becoming mainstream to calculate a personal carbon footprint and pay to become carbon neutral.

But there are many people on the other side of the argument. Many people who have been long term offsetters are turning away from offsetting because of the many projects gone sideways or not gone at all.

Robert Del Naja of the band Massive Attack said “Ultimately, carbon offsetting transfers emissions from one place to another rather than reducing them.” Massive Attack used to pay for carbon offsets for their tours but no longer think this is a good option.

Overestimating Carbon Reductions

As mentioned above, one of the main problems with carbon offset projects is that they don’t actually offset as much as they claim.

California has implemented a cap-and-trade program which allows companies a certain cap of emissions to be created each year. Companies can then buy or sell allowances to keep them within their set limits and creating a market for the pollution. Forest landowners were earning money if they halted plans to cut trees. But then they would turn around and cut down a different area of land that they did not sell in a credit. So really the emissions happened – just in a different spot. This is called “leakage”.

Many of the projects that were part of the most popular carbon offset standard should not have passed the additionality test. Many landowners had no intentions of deforesting their land but they accepted the carbon offset payments anyways. In this case, there was no actual carbon benefits as the forest would have remained the same either way.

Another criticism of carbon offsets is that they are difficult to price. If they are too cheap, people will not be motivated to reducing their carbon emissions but rather simply purchase offsets for them. But if they were too expensive people might not purchase them.

Offsets Used To Gain Marketplace Value

Each year 13 million hectares of forest in (mainly in the tropics) are cut down to create space for livestock and agriculture. These new industries compete with US industries for soybeans, beef, timber and palm oil. So it is in the US industries’ best interest to invest in offsets that would reduce their competition while maybe even adding incentive to NOT reduce their emissions because of the cheap offset they can make in lieu of reduction action.

Another carbon offset scam developed to take advantage of the destruction of one of the more potent greenhouse gases – HFC-23 which is a product of the production of gases used in air conditioning and refrigeration. One carbon credit is earned when one tonne of carbon is removed from the atmosphere but 11,000 credits are earned when a tonne of HFC-23 is removed through a fairly simple process.

Billions of euros worth of carbon credits funded Chinese chemical companies that were purposely manufacturing HCFC-22 solely to earn money from destroying HFC-23. This dangerous hydrofluorocarbon is almost 13,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere. These European companies spent the equivalent of 2 billion euros at today’s prices on this carbon offset scam instead of putting it towards cutting their own emissions.

The levels of HFC-23 actually started increasing in 2016 after a long time of reductions after the Kyoto Protocol banned them. But countries like the United States, China and India have not ratified the agreement. The values that are reported are much different from the values that are being measured in the atmosphere.

When the European Union stopped purchasing carbon credits for the destruction of HFC-23 in China, many plants in China simply vented the HFC-23 into the atmosphere.

Carbon Colonization

Unfortunately there are worse reasons carbon offsetting is not working.

Many communities in Uganda have been destroyed because of carbon offsetting projects set to conserve forests. The Ugandan government allowed a Norwegian company Green Resources the rights to property in order to conserve it. Green Resources came into the area and destroyed homes to make forestry plantations. They arrested people for trying to access the forest that they have always used to collect fire wood, medicines and water holes for livestock.

A similar event happened in at Mount Elgon National Park in Uganda where The Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and Face the Future from the Netherlands partnered to create a carbon offset project. Once again, local residents were extracted from their homes without compensation. The project did not meet it’s goals and reforestation ended in 2003.

A United Nations program Reducint Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation in developing countries (REDD+) creates financial values for carbon stored in forests. Indigenous Peoples asked that REDD+ cancel the carbon trading on projects in or near Indigenous Peoples’ lands and territories. For years Indigenous people have suffered from colonialism and they want the United Nations to stop promoting false solutions to climate change.

The Executive Director of Indigenous Environmental Network Tom BK Goldtooth reports that the UN’s Paris Agreement on climate makes no action to cut emissions and does not offer any protection for the rights of Indigenous peoples.

But Goldtooth’s message is not heard and the UN is creating yet another carbon offset standard. CORSIA (Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation) will start in 2021. This scheme will be used by the rapidly growing airline industry. Once again, all of this effort and money is going into creating a scheme (notice I didn’t use the word solution) to offset carbon rather than reduce it.

Problems With Forest Protection Projects

The original carbon offset projects were tree planting. These projects are not a good idea for several reasons.

Tree planting is a very cheap way for businesses and countries to meet their compliance schemes for carbon emissions. For just about $1.50 a tonne, tree planting is an attractive option over the cost of switching to renewable energy. Although the net energy reduction is technically the same, carbon reductions from forestry projects are difficult to measure and take much more time to complete.

With the increased global temperatures, the number of forest fires each year is increasing. Historically tree planting projects created an environment that lacked biodiversity. These conditions make forests more susceptible to fires and many young just planted forests have burned down causing wasted carbon offsets. On top of losing the new forest, any carbon that they managed to store in their short life would have been released once again.

Alain Karsenty, a researcher at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD) notes that not all tree planted forests are beneficial to the local environment. Often the tree species selected for tree planting are fast growing like pine, so that they can store carbon faster, but these can cause problems for the local biodiversity and soil.

Some current reforestation practices are better in that they will plant multiple species of trees native to that area. This is better for biodiversity but still, the trees can’t grow fast enough to remove enough carbon by the time we need it removed.

The logic doesn’t make sense in a time critical situation like our current climate crisis. We need to keep a safe level of carbon dioxide globally at 350 parts per million or less. In 2018 the global average was 407.4 ppm. So tree planing will help in the future but we cannot afford to make emissions now. The trees planted now will sequester carbon over the next 100 years in exchange for a company to emit greenhouse gases today.

A very recent study found that tropical trees are losing their ability to remove carbon. This study tracked 300,000 trees over 30 years and found that the trees’ removal of carbon peaked in the 1990s. Over the years, the increase in the number of droughts and increased temperature have slowed growth of the trees thereby slowing their ability to remove carbon.

The fear is that they forests will die and then release all of the carbon they have previously stored. This switch from a carbon sink to a carbon source would only accelerate climate change quicker.

How To Decrease Your Personal Carbon Footprint

If you want to calculate your personal carbon footprint, there are several online carbon footprint calculators that can guide you through the process. These calculators are great because they ask the questions that will teach you what choices you are making that will lead to carbon emissions.

Lifestyle for most people include many activities that have high emissions. Eating meat is a very big emitter for several reasons. The land used to grow the livestock in many cases needed to be deforested. When a forest is destroyed, all of the carbon that the forest stored in the trees and soil gets emitted into the atmosphere. Plus the trees can no longer remove any additional carbon from the atmosphere. So not only are you loosing the potential to remove carbon but you are actually adding carbon in the process.

And that’s not all. Livestock, beef in particular, needs to eat. And more land needs to be deforested to grow the food that feeds the cows that feed the people. And that livestock food most likely requires fertilization and pesticides which also require resources and energy to create.

And this doesn’t even touch on the issues with water scarcity within this cycle. But I won’t get into that now.

So one of the best things people can do to decrease their carbon footprint is to stop eating meat (especially beef) and dairy. Or at least cut back as much as possible.

Obviously walking and cycling to work instead of driving a fuel burning automobile is another way to decreased a personal carbon footprint. And avoiding air travel is important too. The percent of global CO2 emissions due to air travel is quite small, only 2 percent. But emissions from flying increased by 75% between 1990 and 2012 and it is set to grow at an alarming rate as air travel has become accessible to more people. More than one million people in the United States take a plane to work.

If you live in an area that uses fossil fuels to create electricity, you might have the option to pay a little extra to support the green energy initiatives in your area by supplementing your electricity plan with a Renewable Energy Certificates (REC). These RECs ensure that the same amount of energy that you used gets put into the grid from a renewable resource such as solar, hydro or wind.

And finally the new trend in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is to have less kids. The global population growth rate is possibly the single biggest threat to climate change.

But the problem with emissions doesn’t fall on us at the personal level only. Often we don’t have choices about the way our products and services are produced. We can try to choose to purchase products and services from a company that is doing a better job of corporate emissions but that information is not always straight forward. Big businesses need to get on board with reducing their emissions BEFORE purchasing carbon offsets.

AFTER You’ve Decreased Emissions THEN Purchase Carbon Offsets

After you have taken action and decreased the greenhouse gas emissions that are directly related to your lifestyle, then you might want to look into purchasing carbon offsets for your remaining carbon footprint. This might seem obvious but this is the most important point to make. Offsets can be a good thing if we don’t use them as an excuse to maintain an unsustainable lifestyle.

Learning which carbon offsets to purchase can be complicated. If you want the very simple approach, you can select a project that has been chosen by a carbon standard for quality assurance guidelines like Verra’s VCS or The Gold Standard.

According to WWF’s report the Gold Standard was the best of the eight standards compared based on the key criteria used for project selection. Not only did it have the most stringent tests for additionality, it also excludes any project they deemed to have a high chance of adverse impact (like a forest land project).

Many people are beginning to divestment from fossil fuel projects in addition to purchasing carbon offsets. Transferring investments away from non renewable resource energy production is starting to hurt the fossil fuel industry.

Overall, I believe the projects that are part of carbon offset standards are doing great work. But offsetting emissions is not going to solve the global climate crisis, we need to reduce our emissions as a top priority. We need to change the was we live, travel, work. I believe the changes needed will actually improve our lifestyle in the long run but it will be a difficult transition.