Companies’ addiction to junk carbon offsets is killing the planet
Before “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things” was a Taylor Swift song, it was a punch line to a Paula Poundstone joke from the 1980s about how, as a kid, she once knocked a Flintstones glass off a table, making her mother say, “That’s why we can’t have nice things.”
It’s an evergreen line that apparently even applies to the world of carbon offsets, those absolutions that companies and people like Taylor Swift buy when they burn fossil fuels and contribute to the heating of the planet. A new study from Kyoto University suggests the notorious flaws of the carbon-credit market are partly the result of a handful of huge companies buying up the shakiest available products. If not for them, maybe there would be more demand for better offsets. Maybe we’d have nice things.
The top 20 players in the market between 2020 and 2023 – a list of companies that includes Shell Plc, Delta Air Lines Inc. and Chevron Corp. – bought mostly “low-quality, cheap offsets,” according to the study. Specifically, 87% of their offsets “carry a high risk of not providing real and additional emissions reductions.” It’s the latest embarrassment for a once-burgeoning market that has begun to shrink under scrutiny and lawsuits. Last month, the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), a group that oversees corporate decarbonization, declared carbon offsets “mostly ineffective.”
For one thing, it is very difficult to figure out how much any particular forestry project truly affects the world’s carbon budget. These projects often sell absolution on the basis that trees are not being cut down. But what if the trees weren’t ever going to be cut down in the first place? Should you really get credit for a thing not happening?
