Carbon offset programs are very popular. You probably have seen them as check-box options when booking flights. You can cancel your greenhouse gas emissions here.
It is an appealing proposition that you can go about your business with no climate guilt. It is, at least for now, if it sounds too good to be true.
Readers were asked to submit questions about climate change and carbon offsets by the New York Times. How do they work? One reader asked if they work at all, or if it's just guilt money.
The idea of carbon offsets is simple. Humans release tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases every year. It is possible to remove carbon from the atmosphere by planting trees.
To compensate for emissions in one place, offsets try to fund emission reductions or carbon removal somewhere else.
They are seen as an essential tool to limit environmental damage, at least in the short to medium term, until the world can make a full transition to renewable energy. The European Union and Australia are relying on them to meet their national goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Bruce M. Usher is a professor of professional practice at Columbia Business School and the former chief executive of EcoSecurities Group, which has designed emissions-reduction projects in developing countries.
The world needs to either stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere or fully counteract them by the year 2050 to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to scientists.
If you want to align with your values, you should buy carbon credits.
Sign up for the Climate Forward newsletter Your must-read guide to the climate crisis.Many offset projects don't come close to the benefits they promise.
A study published last year found that California's forest carbon offsets program was likely to have overstated its emission reductions. The European Union Commission concluded that 85 percent of the projects it examined were unlikely to achieve their reduction claims. An investigation by ProPublica found that forest preservation projects had not offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to.
Climate change can cause even well-designed projects to go awry, as was the case last summer when fires in California burned more than 150,000 acres of forests that the state had paid to set aside as carbon offsets.
Structural problems are related to something called additionality.
A carbon offset needs to fund reductions that wouldn't have happened otherwise. If you pay someone to preserve a grove, but they never plan to cut it down, you are not offsetting your emissions. It is difficult to establish the facts in these cases with the level of confidence required for offset programs to work.
Hurricanes and pollution. The study found that particulate air pollution has a significant effect on hurricanes. Over the past four decades, the decline in air pollution in North America and Europe was associated with a rise in the number of hurricanes; increasing pollution from growing economies had the opposite effect.
The fire is being fought with fire. As deadly wildfires become more common across America, the country is embracing planned fires to clear away vegetation. The changing climate is making it more difficult to carry out intentional burns.
The idea that it is possible to meaningfully combat climate change while living our lives and structuring our society in the same way we always have is part of the appeal of carbon offsets. Some experts see carbon offsets as damaging because they give people cover to avoid reducing emissions at the source.
Kate Ervine, an associate professor of global development studies at Saint Mary, said that distraction diverts attention away from analyzing what we could do that is more meaningful.
Climate change is driven by the actions of the fossil fuel industry and individual activities have environmental costs, but flying is one of the costliest. The majority of carbon offsets are purchased by corporations, including fossil fuel companies, on the premise that they can hit zero emission targets without fundamentally changing how they operate.
Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, said that the most basic problem with carbon offsets is that you're trading a known amount of emissions with an uncertain amount of emissions reductions.
The sorts of programs tied to offsets are worthwhile and essential to mitigate the damage done by decades of greenhouse gas emissions, but the sticky part is using them to justify more emissions. Even if we could calculate how much carbon a new grove of trees would absorb, tying it to the release of more carbon would keep levels steady, and we need them to go down.
In principle, offsets can be valuable. The cement industry is a good candidate for an offset program because it is more expensive and technically complicated to reduce emissions from cement production.
The programs would need to be designed and administered differently than they are now, and consumers would need to pay more than the few dollars per ton of carbon dioxide that they currently do.
If you were to change the entire industrial structure, focus on a subset of activities and accept prices that are higher than they are today, we can do that.
The best thing an individual can do is try to emit less.
The Gold Standard and Green-e certifications can be used to identify worthwhile emission reduction projects.
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