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Carbon offsetting
Carbon offsetting is paying for someone else to reduce emissions for you. It has been sold as particularly useful for those emissions we ‘can’t’ reduce, and companies use it to claim ‘carbon neutral’ status. But many offsetting projects are of dubious benefit and may have negative impacts on local communities.
Picture: A polluting iron factory in Raipur, India which is claiming carbon credits
Tree-planting projects only soak up the CO2 they are supposed to offset over their lifetime, not when the CO2 is actually being emitted. The resulting forest has to stay there forever to be effective, which simply cannot be guaranteed, and even then it is difficult to really measure how many emissions they have offset.
Other projects in poor countries which are granted saleable ‘carbon credits’ include industries which clean up their operations to some degree, but still pump out pollution into the local environment. Finance from the carbon offset market allows them to expand their operations, damaging the health of local residents and the atmosphere further. Some projects would have happened anyway, even without offsetting money from rich countries.
Even if offsetting projects were better regulated so only those with genuine benefits qualified, they would still be used as an excuse for rich countries not to reduce their own emissions. HSBC and Sky are two companies which have claimed to be ‘carbon neutral’ even as their actual emissions continued rising.
The longer we try to buy our way out of climate change and avoid making emissions cuts here in the UK, the more perilous life becomes for many millions of poor people across the world. Rich countries have a moral responsibility to actually take steps to reduce their own emissions.
Find out more
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Cheatneutral |
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The Voluntary Carbon Offset Market |
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The carbon neutral myth |
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