At
the recent New York United Nations Climate Action Summit 70 countries
made
a promise
that
by 2050, they say they will reach “net zero,” putting no more
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than can be somehow canceled out.
With little talk of eliminating the use of fossil fuels, they engaged
in some tricky jiggery-pokery with statistics to appear committed to
carbon emission reductions. It involves a policy of offsets which
permits polluters to get credit for cutting their own emissions by
paying someone in another city, state or country to reduce theirs.
Buying and selling carbon credits is being promoted by the
International
Emissions Trading Association,
an alliance including oil companies, banks and environmental
consultants that get paid to run offset projects.
Carbon offset
schemes were set up to allow the largest polluters who exceed
permitted emissions’ levels to fund projects, such as
reforestation, that reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air,
essentially balancing out their emissions equation.
Shell
CEO Ben van Beurden called on policy experts to create
trustworthy standards so companies and countries could buy and sell
carbon credits on a global scale. “In a way, I don’t care where
the standard comes from…as long as it works,” he said. “We want
to actually be able to make money out of this.”
Case
after case has shown 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. The polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO2.
“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.
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. Investors planning to build a coal plant in India
could instead decide to build a solar plant, using the money from the
anticipated sale of carbon credits to cover the higher costs of
developing solar power. The gap in emissions between the hypothetical
coal plant and the actual solar farm would be converted to offsets.
(Each credit is equal to the global warming caused by a metric ton of
CO₂.) The program subsidized thousands of projects, including
hydropower, wind and, infamously, coal
plants that claimed credits for being more
efficient than they would have been. CDM became mired in
technical and human
rights scandals, and the European Union stopped accepting most
credits. A
2016 report found that 85% of offsets had a “low likelihood”
of creating real impacts.
Another
global program, Joint Implementation, has a similar track record. A
2015
paper found that 75% of the credits issued were unlikely to
represent real 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.
Buying
carbon credits in exchange for a clean conscience while you carry on
flying, buying diesel cars and powering your homes with fossil fuels
is being challenged by people concerned about climate change.
Scientists, activists and concerned citizens have started to voice
their concerns over how carbon offsets have been used by polluters as
a free pass for inaction.
“UN
Environment supports carbon offsets as a temporary measure leading up
to 2030, and a tool for speeding up climate action,” says UN
Environment climate specialist Niklas Hagelberg. “However, it is
not a silver bullet, and the danger is that it can lead to
complacency.
Last
March, more than 90 researchers and academics signed a
letter
urging policymakers not to rely on carbon markets or offsets to solve
climate change, citing a history of environmental and social
problems, explaining that:
“It
is well documented that carbon markets have failed spectacularly in
achieving their environmental objectives and that many carbon offset
projects have a devastating social impact. In spite of this evidence,
carbon markets remain the main policy tool to address climate change
in Europe, based on the misguided hope that they will work “once
the price is right”. Yet, beyond the well-known issues of excess
permits and frauds, it has also been demonstrated that carbon markets
have major conceptual flaws that cannot be fixed, such as the
inability to provide a reliable price signal or the fact that the
climate impact of offset projects is not calculable. When carbon
becomes a new asset class for investors, carbon markets will be much
more vulnerable than traditional financial markets to crashes and
abrupt losses of confidence from investors, with a high risk of
contagion to other asset classes and the wider economy. ”
“We
ought to focus on making sure that emissions reductions are real and
verified,” Nathaniel Keohane, an environmental economist at
Environmental Defense Fund. Keohane said that even if the world
maximizes its use of offsets, major polluters like the United States
won’t be able to reach net zero without also slashing their own
fossil fuel use. There just aren’t enough carbon credits to do it
for them.
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