Carbon offsets are, and have always been, bullshit

The article Revealed: more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by biggest provider are worthless, analysis shows by Patrick Greenfield (The Guardian) reveals what it says in the title. It’s an excellent article proving to us what many of us already suspected strongly or already “knew”: the carbon-offset system looks like a scam and it is a scam. The company Verra, responsible for providing about ¾ of carbon offsets globally, is being accused of having sold 20x more credits than it can actually verify. That is, it is being accused of having lied about 95% of the carbon credits it sold.

This is the deal we’ve had for decades now. They pretend to do things and we pretend to believe them.

Obviously in a market where it’s difficult to prove whether the product being sold actually does what it says on the tin—and those that purchase it don’t really care whether it does because it doesn’t affect them in the short- or medium-term.

Reduction is the only way

A colleague of mine commented,

“Better to avoid carbon-dioxide emission in the first place than to compensate or offset them later.”

Agree 100%. We don’t have to clean up or compensate the carbon that we never emit. We don’t have to produce energy that we don’t require. Reduction is not only the most powerful, but also seemingly the only viable way forward because our globalized system has shown itself again and again to be incapable of focusing on the climate crisis—it is largely concerned with matters more … remunerative in nature.

I mean, look at the graphic to the left! You spew carbon, but you make it better by paying someone else not to. But who determines how much they’re allowed to sell? Who audits this system? Who ensures that the same credits aren’t sold multiple times?

How could anyone imagine that this type of system would actually provide the purported benefit—controlled and reduced CO² output—within the confines of the economic and political system we have. It was never anything but a bad joke that provided the masters of the universe with a cheap way to tell themselves that they not only have all of the money, but also the moral high ground.

Handling Verra

If we had a functioning system in place, then the solution would be to take Verra to court, and quickly decide what the truth of the matter is. If they truly were “leveraging” carbon offsets (i.e., lying about how much they had to sell), then they should be forced to pay back all of the customers to whom they sold fraudulent goods. If there isn’t enough left to go around (the money might very well be gone), then their customers will have to take a loss.

Verra’s customers, in turn, would then be required to purchase replacement carbon offsets from elsewhere or, failing that, to inform their customers that the product they sold them (e.g., a carbon-offset flight) did not actually include a carbon offset, for which their customers would be entitled to a rebate.

It sounds relatively straightforward, and it will also never happen. Unless this report from the Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial gets real legs, it will be forgotten soon enough, much as the Panama Papers had no real repercussions. We looked, we saw, we nodded, we acknowledged that we weren’t really surprised, we shrugged, and resigned ourselves to living in a world over which we have very little power to effect large-scale changes.

Verra will almost certainly continue to be a going concern and might even become more successful—they did after all come up with a savvy business model that generated a lot of profit. If the punishment isn’t too high, then their EBITA probably stays quite rosy.

The whole system is broken

The masters of our universe are not primarily interested in solving the climate crisis. They are interested primarily in profit and are willing to tell a few stories about how they’re doing something about slowing climate change, if that will keep us quiet. If the climate is actually saved as a side-effect of profit, then that’s nice to have, but it’s not a requirement.

And we—the royal we, the hoi polloi, not the individuals on this forum, who are all enlightened souls 😉—for our part, are willing to stay quiet, even though we are 100% aware that we really shouldn’t believe a word they say.

This is the deal we’ve had for decades now. They pretend to do things and we pretend to believe them.

Of course, we are still left with a planet that has suffered extra years, if not decades, under accelerating carbon usage, perhaps partially because so many were convinced that carbon offsets were a real thing—or as noted above, allowed ourselves to be convinced or convinced ourselves—so that we could continue to do what we were going to do anyway, but with less of a guilty conscience.

And this isn’t just be me being a Cassandra. The article cites Barbara Haya in the final paragraph,

“One strategy to improve the market is to show what the problems are and really force the registries to tighten up their rules so that the market could be trusted. But I’m starting to give up on that. I started studying carbon offsets 20 years ago studying problems with protocols and programs. Here I am, 20 years later having the same conversation. We need an alternative process. The offset market is broken.”