Carbon Offsetting could never work
The results of a 25 year study into the practice of “carbon offsetting” have found that many projects fail for entirely foreseeable reasons and many of the projects that don’t, never correct the climate damage they were designed to offset.
Image Source: Unsplash
The theory behind carbon offsetting is as follows. You conduct an activity that emits greenhouse gases to the equivalent of one tonne of carbon dioxide. This could be one tonne of carbon dioxide. Or it could be 40kg of methane, or 44 grams of sulphur hexafluoride (used as a tracer gas and as an insulator in high voltage electrical equipment). Let’s say it was caused by your private jet flight. A private jet flight can emit about one tonne of carbon dioxide per passenger over the course of a 1,000 km flight from Edinburgh to London and back, compared to about a quarter of that for a commercial flight and about 3.5% of that for a train journey.
Now, you’ve been getting a lot of flack for your private jet flights and the climate damage they cause but you’re not willing to actually stop taking them, so you decide to add a little surcharge to the cost of your flight to buy one “carbon credit”. This is effectively a certificate that adds to a pot of money somewhere. Nations are supposed to issue only so many of these certificates in a year and to decrease the amount the issue each year – forcing people who can’t buy a certificate to reduce emissions instead.
Someone, somewhere else, decides to do something climate friendly that will pull one tonne of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away where it can’t cause climate damage. Maybe they plant a tree. When they do, they get awarded a carbon credit from the pot of money, along with the money you paid for the credit certificate – subsidising their tree planting. So, the theory goes, the emissions caused by your private jet flight are sucked out of the atmosphere by the tree and everything is carbon neutral or “Net Zero”. Scotland in particular has gone all in on encouraging these projects to the point that where the large estates that dominate Scotland were once used for shooting grouse and deer they are increasingly used by billionaires and private equity funds to harvest carbon credits instead.
The real world is a lot more complicated than that and involves all kinds of financial fineagling including the global trade of certificates so that nations who are reducing emissions faster (or who never emitted as much as richer nations did) can sell their “excess” credits as well as trade in future credits that haven’t been issued yet but everyone is sure they one day will which doesn’t sound like a financial bubble in the making AT ALL.
“The actual amount of carbon actually captured under carbon credit schemes over the past 25 years could be as little as a tenth of what was advertised.”
The financial side of the carbon credit sector is worthy of its own article but I want to talk this week about the carbon absorption side of things. A new study has just been published that looked at 25 years of carbon removal projects – ranging from “low tech” solutions like tree planting to “high tech” solutions like directly removing CO2 from the air and pumping it into caves or old oil wells. They found multiple problems with the entire carbon credit industry that render the whole idea nearly worthless. These range from “double counting” issues (If I plant a tree that absorbs one tonne of carbon dioxide I get to claim I’m reducing my own emissions by one tonne but if I sell a carbon credit to you then you also get to claim that you are reducing YOUR emissions be one tonne – both can’t be true), through timing issues (your private jet flight starts causing climate damage from the moment you take it, but my tree could take several years to reabsorb the emissions so that they stop causing damage), through failures in the projects (if a wildfire – perhaps one caused by your private jet flight – burns down my forest, then it can no longer absorb the carbon you emitted), through the permanence of the capture of carbon even if the scheme works (If the tree eventually dies and rots, or if the carbon you stored in the cave eventually leaks out, then it just ends up back in the atmosphere again over a timescale ranging from a few decades to a couple of thousand years where the original fossil fuels had stored that carbon for hundreds of millions of year).
All in, they found that the actual amount of carbon actually captured under carbon credit schemes over the past 25 years could be as little as a tenth of what was advertised.
This all goes to show the scam that is the “carbon credit” model of climate change mitigation. Very rich people are paying money basically as an environmental equivalent of medieval church indulgences to salve their soul as they continue to disproportionately wreck the planet and then often the same rich people and the corporations they own are extracting that money in carbon credits for schemes that do nothing to actually reduce the harm they caused. Meanwhile, the Government is chasing a “Net Zero” climate target that basically only says “we promise to keep harming the planet until 2045, and then we’ll stop but we won’t fix the damage we’ve caused” while selling out any hope of actual land reform because of all of the carbon credit money sloshing around driving up land prices beyond the hopes of communities to own the ground under their feet.
And now we know that even as they do that, the pollution won’t stop and the “mitigations” don’t work.
The Scottish Government must take the warnings of this paper to heed and adjust their climate strategy accordingly. No more carbon credits can be sold for the purpose of “offsetting” current emissions, only for removing carbon already present due to historic emissions. Current emissions must be reduced urgently, taxed appropriately and regulated away. Investments must be ramped up to reduce and eliminate demand for pollution fuels and products. Where carbon capture still has its place, regulations must be tightened and compliance enforced – it does us absolutely no good if we base our climate strategy on “a new forest will balance emissions in 2046” if the forest burns down in 2044 with no time to replace it.
In 2019, Common Weal published our Common Home Plan which showed how Scotland could achieve True Zero carbon emissions and actively start to repair the damage we’ve caused to the planet. The Government still has time to take on this blueprint, albeit it will now be harder and more expensive to enact because to the delays, but even then it will still be cheaper than missing those climate targets because we let the billionaires keep pollution on the promise that they’d fix it later – which we now know, they never could.
