“There’s really no such thing as a ‘carbon offset’. If you really look at it, it’s made up”

Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network appears in a great new Al Jazeera episode: “Do carbon offsets even work?”

“There’s a story being spun - a fantasy we’re being sold - the notion that we can ‘offset’ all the carbon we generate. That I can even get onto a flight and if I’ve ticked the right box and paid a few extra dollars when purchasing my ticket my journey can be ‘carbon neutral’ with ‘net zero’ implications for the planet. ‘Carbon offsets’, ‘net zero’, ‘carbon neutral’. All of these catch phrases, these labels they sound too good to be true. And that’s because they are.”

That’s Ali Rae of Al Jazeera in the first episode of a series called “All Hail The Planet”. Broadcast in November 2022, it looks into the social, economic, and political forces that are undermining meaningful action to address the climate crisis. The first episode is called “Do carbon offsets even work?”

Spoiler alert: Betteridge’s Law of headlines applies.

Rae highlights the ambitious pledges that politicians have recently made to slow down or halt the destruction of our planet. Here are a few of them:

• “Europe will be the world’s first climate neutral continent.”

  Ursula von der Leyen, EU President

• “Net zero emissions.”

  Joe Biden, US President

• “Net zero by 2050….”

  Liz Truss, ex-UK Prime Minister

• “Net zero…”

  Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister

• “…becoming a net zero emissions energy business by 2050.”

  Ben van Beurden, Shell’s CEO

The promises sound great, Rae notes, but things get murky on closer inspection of the language.

Rae talks to Joanna Cabello of the World Rainforest Movement. “It is important to remember that the language of ‘carbon neutral’ or ‘net zero’ emissions is incredibly misleading and it hides important contradictions,” Cabello says.

“It’s basically based on an idea that pollution can be compensated somewhere else by a project implemented mostly in the Global South that should either avoid emissions or absorb emissions. And by doing so compensate the pollution from the polluter. Not because they are reducing, not because they are capping their emissions, but because they are getting some credit that they are doing the compensation, the cleaning up somewhere else.

“This logic of offsetting is what is misleading in all this language because one would think, ‘Oh, companies are actually doing something about it, they are addressing the problem’. And that is confusing for people in civil society that are trying to demand some action for climate change.”

Fundamental premise is deeply flawed

Climate scientists and activists question carbon offsets, “because they just do not do what they claim,” Rae notes. “They can’t. Not when the fundamental premise on which these programmes are based in so deeply flawed.”

Rae highlights the offsets that Qantas, Australia’s largest airline company, sells under its “Fly Carbon Neutral” programme. In 2019, REDD-Monitor exposed the fact that Qantas was selling offsets from the April Salumei REDD project in Papua New Guinea - a project involved in a huge scam, and which had pretty much ground to a halt by 2019.

Rae describes how it’s supposed to work with the help of a fancy graphic:

One negative (emissions from a Qantas flight) plus one positive (CO2 absorbed by trees) equals “Net zero”.

Cabello explains why this doesn’t work:

“It is really important that we understand that there are two very different types of carbon. And this is barely talked about but it’s fundamental. So we have fossil carbon. These are the fossils that are locked underground for millions and millions of years. And then you have the biological carbon which is this more dynamic carbon that flows around trees, vegetation, oceans and it’s dynamic, it changes, it goes from one to the other.

“But what is fundamental in the climate crisis is that the unlocking of fossil carbon that took millions of years to be created, these are being burned in the shape of petroleum, gas, or coal in a massive scale in a short period of time. And that creates an impossible imbalance for the earth’s capacity to deal with this, to absorb it, to regulate it, if we don’t stop burning petroleum, oil, and gas we are not addressing the problem. And offsets is a way to not talk about this.”

Rae then speaks to Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “There’s really no such thing as a ‘carbon offset’,” Goldtooth says. “If you really look at it, it’s made up. There is no such thing as offsetting pollution by planting a tree. Even the scientists agree with this.”

Goldtooth also points out that fossil carbon and biological carbon are two different things in terms of the climate:

“You can’t swap carbon that’s been part of the combustion process of fossil fuels for above ground carbon in the biosphere. They’re separate entities. But the market system doesn’t differentiate that. They package it up together. So we’re being scammed, when there’s really no offsets. It’s just a way of business people can make money and to look good on paper.”

Cabello again:

“It doesn’t matter for the offset scheme where this molecule is coming from, when was it done, or how long it was in the atmosphere. What matters is the polluter has an accounting sheet, some numbers where it says how many molecules they are emitting and the offset project on the other side also has an accounting sheet where they say how many CO2 molecules they are absorbing or reducing or avoiding to emit. And therefore this trading can happen.”

An elaborate ruse by Big Corporations

Rae highlights some of the companies that use offsets to reach their sustainability goals, including Amazon, Unilever, Disney Google, Cemex, and Shell. “Now, if by this point you think the whole ‘carbon offset’, ‘net zero’, obsession is an elaborate ruse created by big corporations as a distraction and diversion tactic,” Rae says, “well you wouldn’t be completely wrong. Big Business, especially Big Oil, has played a significant role in lobbying for and developing carbon trading markets.”

But it’s not just Big Polluters. The United Nations and several governments have also been involved. Emissions trading featured in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. It’s a pity that Rae doesn’t mention that it was Al Gore, as lead negotiator for the USA, that insisted on carbon trading as part of the Kyoto agreement.

Neither does she mention that in 2004 Gore set up a company to cash in on carbon trading called Generation Investment Management LLP. The company, which actually consists of several companies - many of which are registered in tax havens, was created ten months before the Kyoto Protocol came into force.

The Clean Development Mechanism, which came out of the Kyoto Protocol, created two billion carbon credits. “The program has been mired in complexity and controversy,” Rae notes.

Cabello says that,

“It has been widely research that the Clean Development Mechanism brought about incredible amount of injustices on the ground. So we see, for example, hydroelectric dams are being said to produce ‘clean energy’. It’s another misleading claim because it is in fact not ‘clean’ at all. We have the energy production that is produced by water but there is a whole infrastructure that was built on sometimes a forest, or another river ecosystem, and the energy that is produced there is usually, most of the time, not going to be delivered to the communities around that are most of the times without access to energy. It’s going to be, most of the time, for mining industry that are nearby, that need the energy in order to keep extracting. So we see how the design of the scheme is not really taking consideration of the social aspects, of the environmental aspects, but is only considering the accounting sheets.”

REDD: “very vulnerable to being gamed”

In 2007, another UN-backed carbon trading programme came into being: Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). “The REDD plan was quite ingenious in its simplicity: developing countries would basically be paid not to cut down trees,” Rae says.

She speaks to Britaldo Soares Filho, a deforestation and modelling expert in Brazil. “So I participated once and never more,” Filho says.

“I was invited as part of a scientific committee for the first REDD project in Brazil, in the Amazon forest. Me, together with several scientists. And then in the end I found that it was not really a scientific project but a project to sell carbon credits.

“We were pioneers in developing modelling for simulating deforestation,” Filho explains. “And they borrowed those methods to develop these delusional REDD baselines. So it doesn’t matter the technical details if the methods are unsound.”

Rae highlights one of the problems with REDD. “The more deforestation you anticipate, the more carbon credits you generate and the more money you can make. The whole system is very vulnerable to being gamed.”

Some REDD projects used free software that Filho developed called Dinamica Ego. The software programme forecasts land-use changes over time. It was designed to measure the impact of policy decisions on forested areas. It could, for example, estimate the potential impact of expanding cattle and soy industries in the Amazon basin.

But the software cannot be used to predict the future. Filho says that,

“We have a disclaimer that we don’t support applying spatial models to set up baselines because deforestation depends much more on the national political context. So if you say, ‘I’m going to protect this region’, the difference is very small because all the drivers of deforestation are really controlled by the political signal that the government passes.”

Rae notes that, “Criticisms of how REDD programmes are executed are not misplaced. In 2015, a French study into 120 REDD projects across Latin America, East Africa, and Asia found that nearly 40% overlapped with existing protected lands like national parks. Many had failed the additionality criteria. And the authors of the study concluded that REDD had been reduced to simply, ‘a logo to attract financing’.”

In 2018, Norway’s Office of the Auditor General completed its investigation into Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative. Norway is, “by far the most generous supporter of REDD, while simultaneously being a major exporter of oil and natural gas,” Rae says.

The Office of the Auditor General found that despite a decade’s work and US$3 billion in funding, results from REDD projects were “delayed and uncertain” and “the risk of carbon leakage is considerable ... where the stopping of logging in one area leads to an increase in logging elsewhere”.

REDD: “A new market for climate profiteers”

Permanence is another problem. To capture emissions, trees need to survive for centuries. “But because of climate change,” Rae says, “storing carbon in trees has become increasingly unstable. Drought, fire, and flood will see many of the offset projects created today destroyed in the coming decades.”

And there just isn’t enough land on the planet to soak up the every increasing amount of corporate carbon emissions. In 2021, Oxfam put out a report titled “Tightening the net”. Oxfam estimates that to meet net zero by 2050 would need an area five times the size of India or more than all the farmland on the planet.

“All REDD has done,” Rae says, “is create a new market for climate profiteers.”

Cabello points out that despite many problems on the ground, REDD projects are certified anyway:

“Now, after years of having those schemes in place and running we see how flawed they are and how many projects that have been certified actually have a lot of conflicts on the ground and have a lot of irregularities. So there are problems from the technical point of view or from the social aspect of the project, but nevertheless the certifiers are certifying a lot of these projects. Because it’s a business.

“Who is regulating the regulators?”

Filho compares carbon markets to a stock market:

“It’s like a stock market. You buy stock from a company and then you can resell it to somebody else. And this person can resell to another one. And so it goes on. So the market can become a monster itself and takes its own path. Because the final goal of the market is to make profit not really to mitigate climate change.”

REDD re-branded: Nature-Based Solutions

“The problems with REDD just kept piling up,” Rae says. As a result REDD has been re-branded as part of Nature-Based Solutions. Rae notes that the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) is one of the organisations pushing Nature-Based Solutions at the UN level. Members of IETA include BP, Shell, Aramco, and Chevron. IETA has a Markets for Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) Intitiative. IETA states that, “Markets for NCS aims to extend our ambitions to using nature in its entirety as a way to both remove greenhouse gases and to manage land use emissions.”

As Rae points out, Natural Climate Solutions replicate the fundamental flaw in the Clean Development Mechanism and REDD: “It is a compensation based system. Carbon emissions are not reduced, instead they are supposedly offset through complex and opaque emissions trading markets enabling companies to say they are carbon neutral even though they are still burning fossil fuels.”

Tom Goldtooth adds that,

“Any concept of trading air in a colonial market system treats it as a property right. So the question that is often resolved in these negotiations is the corporation ending up owning the property of the carbon in the trees….

“Carbon market scenarios are being utilised to allow civil society to relieve their guilt. It’s a diversion technique used by carbon traders to distract the public from important action of keeping oil, gas, and coal in the ground. That’s the bottom line….

“After 25 plus years of fighting the carbon markets I think we can reasonably claim that carbon trading, offsets, carbon pricing, and all of the iterations of REDD+, nature-based solutions, net-zero emissions targets, it’s all the same thing. It is the biggest distraction and scam on Mother Earth, on the planet.”

Cabello comments on the neoliberalisation of the climate debate:

“This idea, which is the complete neoliberalisation of the climate debate where all nature should become a service provider to humans is a very deep, alarming threat to forest peoples. Because behind each of these claims there is land that is being enclosed for doing an offset project.

“So what we call this is that there is a conservation industry nowadays.”

That’s the same conservation industry that is behind IETA’s Markets for Natural Climate Solutions: Conservation International, Environmental Defense Fund, Earth Innovation Institute, and The Nature Conservancy.

Cabello highlights the failure of decades of UN climate meetings:

“What we see in all these years of UN negotiations and climate debates is that pollution is increasing even though so many schemes have been put in place. We need to think of offsets as as a scheme that is actually making the problem worse. Not at all making it better. So there are no ‘good’ projects or ‘bad’ projects. All these certifications, it just kind of masks the criticism that is underneath.

Talking about CO2 molecules instead of the fossil fuel industry’s violence and abuse of power

“There’s a story being spun,” Rae says. “A lie we’re being told. It’s the notion that we can ‘offset’ all the carbon we generate. The only way to reduce carbon pollution is to reduce carbon emissions, to actually cut fossil fuel extraction and usage. All of the other stuff - tree planting, protecting and restoring ecosystems, investing in renewable energy - all of that’s great and very much needed. But without reducing our structural demand for fossil fuels we are in effect not just doing nothing, we’re making things worse.”

The programme ends with a very important comment from Cabello:

“Offsets are making us believe that something is being done, when actually what is being done is worsening the problem. It’s allowing the drivers to go and expand, to even claim that it’s ‘green’, that it’s ‘sustainable’. So instead of talking about fossil fuels, we are talking about CO2 molecules and while doing so it actually conceals all the violence and the abuse of power that the fossil fuel industry is built upon.”