Aviation and the offsetting climate scam
In an article published last week in The Washington Post, journalist JD Shadel takes a look at the carbon offsets that airlines offer.
Shadel starts with Lufthansa. The German airline launched its “Green Fares” earlier this year. Under this deal, passengers have the option of paying more while Lufthansa claims it will use the extra money to reduce its emissions. 20% of the reduction comes from using sustainable aviation fuels and 80% from buying carbon offsets.
According to Lufthansa, “This combination of reduction and offsetting is firmly linked to the new fares and offers an easy way to fly more sustainably.”
Flight Free UK pointed out that this is 100% greenwash:
In March 2023, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority banned a Lufthansa advert for misleading the public about the environmental impacts of flying. The advert featured an image of the front of a plane with the underside of the plane represented by an image of the earth from space. The slogan “Connecting the world. Protecting its future” appears over the image
In its ruling, the Advertising Standards Authority wrote that,
We understood that air travel produced high levels of both CO₂ and non-CO₂ emissions, which were making a substantial contribution to climate change. We noted the initiatives and targets Lufthansa said they were committed to delivering in pursuit of their stated goal, but many of these initiatives were targeted to deliver results only years or decades into the future. We also understood that there were currently no environmental initiatives or commercially viable technologies in the aviation industry which would substantiate the absolute green claim “PROTECTING ITS FUTURE”, as we considered consumers would interpret it.
The misleading slogan is still available on Lufthansa’s website:
The Washington Post notes that “Almost every major airline has an offsets-based program” and lists some of the other airlines that offer carbon offsets: American Airlines, Southwest Airline, Ryanair, and Delta Air Lines. Delta is one of the companies buying carbon offsets from the Cordillera Azul National Park REDD project in Peru.
As Tom Younger of Forest Peoples Programme points out, “Carbon offsets are a climate scam and are fuelling human rights violations and injustice - as is the case with Delta’s offsets from Cordillera Azul which violate Kichwa Indigenous peoples territorial rights in the Peruvian Amazon.”
The Washington Post states that Pam Fletcher, Delta’s Chief Sustainability Officer, is now opposed to buying carbon offsets. However she claims that offsets were “the best tool at the time”. This is nonsense. The only thing that carbon offsets are best at is delaying meaningful change to address the climate crisis.
In September 2022, easyJet announced that it would stop buying carbon offsets. The Madre de Dios Amazon REDD+ Project was among the projects that EasyJet bought its offsets. That’s probably the worst REDD project in the world. But that didn’t prevent easyJet from buying more than one million carbon offsets from the project.
“A climate scam”
“Offsetting is a climate scam,” Jo Dardenne of the NGO Transport & Environment told The Washington Post. “Customers should be skeptical about any offsetting programs offered to them,” Dardenne said.
Dardenne compares offsetting to paying someone else to go to the gym for you. “How can I be sure that this person is actually going to the gym?” she asks. “How can I be sure that this person wasn’t already going to go to the gym, anyway?”
She might have pointed out that to do you any good, you actually have to go to the gym yourself.
Dardenne added that,
“Nature-based offsetting schemes are dangerous because you’ll never be able to ensure in a climate emergency that a forest won’t get burned down or flooded. You can never be 100 percent sure these offsets are going to work.”
“Dramatically overestimated” emissions reductions
The Washington Post also spoke to Barbara Haya, research fellow at the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy. Haya said that, “Unlike how they’re presented to travelers, offsets are not really quantified, verified tons of emissions reductions.” The actual emissions are hard to estimate, Haya pointed out. “In today’s offset market, those reductions are dramatically overestimated.”
Haya told The Washington Post that offsets can “justify ongoing or even increased emissions”. She noted that “Offsets don’t actually reduce emissions; they just trade where emissions happen.”
She added that “Airlines are largely throwing their money away by buying offsets,” and suggested that the aviation industry should “pay the higher cost of sustainable aviation fuels”. But there are serious problems with so-called sustainable aviation fuels. Some are produced from crops grown in monoculture plantations such as soy or oil palm, that require huge areas of land. Others are manufactured from by-products of the massively polluting, environmentally damaging, and brutally cruel livestock industry.
Offsetting cannot address the aviation industry’s climate impacts
The fundamental problem with the airline industry (along with every other industry on the planet) is that it is constantly expanding. The underlying problem is capitalism — and the over-consumption associated with an economic system that has to keep growing to survive.
Between 2010 and 2018 emissions from the aviation industry grew by 4 to 5% per year. The industry is now “recovering” from the Covid-19 blip and the International Air Transport Association anticipates that numbers of flights in 2024 will be above 2019 levels.
IATA states that it “expects overall traveler numbers to reach 4.0 billion in 2024”. That sounds as if half the world’s population might fly in 2024. The reality is very different.
A study published in November 2020 in Global Environmental Change found that in 2018, only 11% of the world’s population flew, and only 4% flew abroad.
In the same year, 10% of the most frequent flyers were responsible for 50% of aviation’s carbon emissions. Nearly half of all flights were taken in North America or Northern Europe, where less than 25% of the world’s population lives.
Targeting these frequent flyers would make much more sense than using offsets to greenwash the aviation industry’s ever-increasing pollution.
The study states that,
[A] major share of aviation emissions is generated by a very small share of very high emitters who are geographically located in a few countries. These frequent air travelers are very wealthy individuals, and the effect of market-based measures on reducing their emissions is debatable, specifically in regard to industry plans for mitigation. The international aviation industry’s Carbon Offsetting Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) is designed to offset emissions from international commercial aviation at a low cost, and hence unlikely to slow down fuel consumption and emission growth.
Thank you, great article!
Disclosure: I am 76 years old and never been on a plane, so perhaps I take a dim view of flying, literally putting yourself above Nature?
Several issues: Even if there were such a thing as “sustainable fuels,: at this late stage in the game, all needless burning must STOP.
That is an excellent comparison: paying someone to go to the gym for you!
Even the statement that offsets “…just trade where the emissions happen” is dubious because that would assume that emissions “unhappen” at the REDD+ location, when in fact, even before industrialization, all plant life was already fully involved with balancing planetary CO2 levels.
To get an overview of the excessive flying in N. America and Europe, look at a satellite view of the contrails, it is totally disgusting. Imagine a Clear Sky with none of this flying going on.
And “we” learned nothing from the pandemic about the easy spread of viruses from one place to another?
Avoiding ALL flying is the simplest personal emissions reduction possible. Stay grounded!