Carbon offsetting is a mess. It’s what countries and companies are constantly talking up in order to reach their goals. It’s what we’re relying on when we feel guilty about taking a flight or running a business. There’s a glaring accounting error. We don’t know if tree planting will be at all successful. And it’s the best thing we’ve got at the moment.
The road to climate hell might be paved with baby trees.
A 2017 report for the European Commission found that 85% of offset programs for the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which was designed to allow wealthy countries to buy credits in the form of emission reductions from lower-income countries, failed to deliver “real, measurable and additional” emission reductions, and noted that most of the projects would have happened anyway.
A study in 2015 found that 75% of the credits from the Joint Implementation (JI) global program did not have meaningful reductions, and that if countries had cut pollution on-site instead of relying on offsets, global CO2 emissions would have been 600 million tons lower.
In 2015, a French research center examined 120 REDD projects and found that 37% overlapped with existing protected lands like national parks. Carbon offsets require an added benefit, known as additionality, and the authors concluded REDD+ was simply layered onto existing conservation plans.
It’s the worst possible idea, except for everything else. – Timothy Searchinger, Princeton Researcher
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