Carbon Offsets Losing Favor

I was gratified to see an article today in the MIT Technology Review that reveals major problems with carbon offsets.

My gratification did not stem from a desire to see the planet burn up before my children reach adulthood. No, it’s precisely the opposite.

Probably most of us wish we could just continue living the good life, burning as much energy as we like (or can afford to consume), without having to change our ways at all. It would be nice if there were a magic bullet solution to climate change: Just spend enough money, and it will all be ok. And if most of us don’t have that money, surely we can finally get our politicians to see sense and make it happen somehow. We Americans can keep on driving, building bigger and better roads with bigger and better cars to go on them, and our collective conscience can be clean, if we can just pay for those offsets in some other country.

But this article confirms what many of us have suspected from the start: There are so many problems with carbon offsets that few such projects are worthwhile. 

“In the fall of 2018, the University of California (UC) tasked a team of researchers with identifying tree planting or similar projects from which it could confidently purchase carbon offsets that would reliably cancel out greenhouse gas emissions across its campuses. 

“The researchers found next to nothing. [...]

“The findings helped prompt the entire university system to radically rethink its sustainability plans. In July, UC announced it would nearly eliminate the use of third-party offsets, charge each of its universities a carbon fee for ongoing pollution, and focus on directly cutting emissions across its campuses and health facilities.”

Tree planting projects represent perhaps the best recognized method of offsetting carbon. But as the article details, a number of studies have found that projects often exaggerate benefits far beyond what they accomplish.

There are numerous ways for companies to cheat, or for other occurrences to cancel out the benefits. For example, if one timber company reduces logging to obtain carbon credits, another might increase logging to meet supply. And sometimes groups engage in double-counting: they sell carbon credits to prevent logging in areas that have already been designated for preservation.

Forest fires might also wipe out hard-won gains. This website offers some sobering statistics on the topic: If a single 50-foot tall oak tree of 12” diameter (DBH) were felled, 35 young trees would be required to make up its carbon capture equivalent. Not only that, but those 35 trees would need to grow for a full 26 years before they matched the old one. Such replacement rarely happens.

Barbara Haya led the in-depth research project on carbon offsets. She lists three main conclusions, in order of priority: “Don’t buy carbon offsets; focus on cutting emissions instead. If you must use offsets, create your own. If you can’t create your own, scrutinize the options in the marketplace very carefully and commit to only buy trustworthy ones.”

Camille Kirk, former director of sustainability at UC Davis, and now director of sustainability at  J. Paul Getty Trust, says, “You can’t buy your way out of this.” Instead, we need to do the “direct work on decarbonization.”

Haya concludes, “We need to move away from the whole idea of offsetting. You can’t fly and drive and burn fossil fuels, and then pay someone else to do something and say you didn’t have an impact.”

The good news is that if we accept the truth about carbon offsets, we can start implementing actual solutions to climate change.

Of course I am a strong proponent of regenerative agriculture, which can use soil, as well as plants, to sequester carbon. Furthermore, every industrial ag farm that converts to regenerative methods also represents a great reduction in carbon emissions.

**There was one statement in the MIT article with which I took issue: “... some sources of emissions will continue to be difficult to eliminate directly for a long time to come, like those from air travel and cattle digestion.”

Somebody should write to the MIT Tech Review editors to inform them that cattle digestion is not inherently climate-damaging! This pervasive myth has caused a lot of harm, to the delight of the fake-meat industry. There is a lot of factual info out there on this topic, and we will post more about here it as well. In the meantime I just want to pose this question: If bovines are so harmful to the environment, how did the planet survive and thrive for all those millennia with the millions of bison pounding across the American continent?

That’s a topic for another day.