Don’t Buy It: The Truth About Carbon Offsets

“Taking a dodgy accounting proposition, which is that you can somehow identify the amount of carbon that any given new bit of forest picks up out of the atmosphere and sequesters, and make that correspond somehow to emissions elsewhere,” is how Greenpeace sees carbon offsetting, according to its senior climate adviser Charlie Kronick. “It can’t be done. The methodology is poor, and the logic isn’t very good either. Once the carbon you’ve put in from fossil fuels is up there, nothing is going to make it go away.”

Thus reports The Independent in a piece that takes a negative–or is the word I’m looking for “realistic”?–view of the current fad of purchasing carbon offsets. If you’re not quite sure why this term rings a bell, you might have run across it in any of the following places: supermarket checkout lanes, travel websites, in-flight programming, celebrity gossip shows, etc., etc. It’s all the rage. The idea is that you can purchase, for a small sum (usually under $50), enough planted trees or wind power to somehow negate the carbon that you put into the atmosphere by traveling, or just by living. I’ve had a number of friends ask me about it, and when I give them that answer, they look at me like I’m crazy and say, “But that doesn’t make any sense!”

That’s because it doesn’t make any sense. On a very basic level, I see how carbon offsets appeal to simple mathematical logic. If you plant–or preserve from deforestation–enough trees to sequester one ton of carbon, then you’ve wiped your hands of the one ton of carbon you just put into the atmosphere by driving around town for a week. Right? The problem is that you are still responsible for that one ton of carbon, because carbon sequestration is not that simple. This is not an equation of (+1)+(-1)=(0). It’s more like (+1)+(0)=(+1). One reason for this is that planting trees is hardly a carbon-neutral process; and in some cases, the carbon offset craze has resulted in damage to the very forests purchasers think they’re protecting, with the construction of new tree plantations and service roads. Offsets are not limited solely to reforestation; the portfolios of the companies selling offsets include many clean energy options.

What makes carbon offsets a particularly bad investment right now is lack of regulation. Most companies offering offsets are firmly for-profit. It’s a largely untapped market of about $100 million, with no oversight, and one in which buyers have no industry standards to guide them and must, instead…take the seller’s word for it. The level of research necessary on the consumer side to achieve a full understanding of the situation is far higher than that to which most consumers are willing to commit. So we take a quick look at the plastic card in the Whole Foods aisle that says “Offset 200 miles of driving by purchasing this $5 card!”, and we throw it in with our organic kale. Now we don’t have to feel guilty about not walking or taking the bus to the store–driving is carbon neutral!

Even the companies selling offsets, it seems, are not always fully aware of the intricacies of their transactions. BusinessWeek reports that one of the largest offset sellers, TerraPass (responsible for the offsets given to Academy Award attendees this year), had no idea that the methane capture system they were supporting at a garbage dump was the result of necessity and legislation, not a spontaneous commitment to carbon reduction. So basically, TerraPass was making money by buying methane “credits” from the waste management company, essentially subsidizing a $13 million private company, and then reselling these “credits” at a higher price in the name of doing good for the environment. The thing is, the waste management company was burning the methane anyway. (Methane is a greenhouse gas that far outclasses CO2 in terms of heat-trapping; burning it turns it into C02, a better gas to release into the atmosphere.) No new projects were started, no trees were planted. The world was seeing exactly as much carbon released, and exactly as much carbon sequestered, before and after all that money changed hands. (+1)+(0)=(+1).

The example I listed above, of choosing to drive to the store instead of walk, is actually a serious threat to progress on the climate change front. If we believe that by purchasing enough “good” energy, we’re entitled to keep using as much “bad” energy as we want, we’ll never reduce our consumption. And reducing our consumption, coupled with a shift to renewable energy sources, is the only way we’ll see the rise in the level of carbon in the atmosphere ever start to even out. Carbon offsets are dangerous as an investment, but they’re also a danger to real change.

This is not to say that they’re all bad. In general, I’m all for anything that raises awareness of the need for climate change action. Carbon offsets, with their celebrity varnish, are helping in that respect. And if offset sales achieved greater transparency, and the providers themselves had to answer to a regulatory body (whether industry-generated or governmental), they might start to do some real good. If you’re going to purchase offsets, just keep in mind that nothing you purchase can change the amount of carbon you are personally responsible for. And you might want to take a look at this consumer’s guide to carbon offsets, published by the Voluntary Carbon Offset Information Portal, a joint initiative of Tufts Climate Initiative and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

Supporting wind energy is great. Supporting methane gas reduction is great. Supporting reforestation initiatives can be great. But the only way you can reduce the carbon footprint of your trip to London is to not fly to London. It’s sad–but it’s true.