Are carbon offsets doing more harm than good?

"An (Even More) Inconvenient Truth: Why Carbon Credits for Forest Preservation May Be Worse Than Nothing" is a new report (from the invaluable ProPublica) about the unintended consequences of a trendy idea for fighting climate change:

In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last.

“Offsets themselves are doing damage,” said Larry Lohmann, who has spent 20 years studying carbon credits. While we’re sitting here counting carbon and moving it around, more CO₂ keeps accumulating in the atmosphere, he said. . . .

California’s cap-and-trade program allows companies to offset a small percentage of their carbon output with forest preservation projects in North America. But this year, the state’s Air Resources Board could approve its proposed Tropical Forest Standard — a blueprint for how carbon offsets could be awarded for intercontinental programs. . . .

If the world were graded on the historic reliability of carbon offsets, the result would be a solid F.

The largest program, the Clean Development Mechanism, came out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, when dozens of nations made a pact to cut greenhouse gases. European leaders wanted to force industry to emit less. Americans wanted flexibility. Developing nations like Brazil wanted money to deal with climate change. One approach they could agree to was carbon offsets.

The idea worked marvelously on paper. If a power plant in Canada needed to shave 10% off of its emissions but didn’t want to pay for technology upgrades, it could buy offsets from projects in the developing world. . . .

Read the whole in-depth report here.





(Photo by Snežana Trifunović, from Wikimedia Commons.)