Voluntary carbon offsets are headed for a crash
In this episode, influential climate blogger Joe Romm discusses whether carbon offsets are, per the title of his recent white paper, “unscalable, unjust, and unfixable.”
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Carbon offsets — whereby one party pays another party to reduce carbon emissions — are an extremely convenient thing to have for people, businesses, and institutions that have money to spend, want to do something green, and either won't or can't reduce their own emissions.
So offset markets have flourished for decades, even in the face of investigation after investigation, exposé after exposé, showing that the emissions reductions they represent are dubious or outright fraudulent.
Things may be coming to a head, though, especially as it slowly sinks in that the Paris Agreement in many ways renders the entire enterprise of offsets moot. If everyone is trying to get as close as possible to zero emissions by 2050, what is gained by trading those reductions back and forth?
A white paper digging deep into these subjects was recently published by none other than Joe Romm. Romm has a PhD in physics from MIT and worked at the Department of Energy in the 1990s, but most people in my world know him as one of the earliest and most influential climate bloggers. He’s also authored numerous books on climate solutions.
As of earlier this year, he is now a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, being run by climate scientist Michael Mann. His first report is on offsets, and it’s a doozy. I called to talk with him about the role offsets have played in the past, the reforms the UN is attempting to make to them, and their future in a post-Paris world.
Okay, with no further ado, Joe Romm, welcome to Volts. Thanks so much for coming.
Joe Romm
Oh, well, thank you so much for having me, Dave.
David Roberts
You know, it's funny. I'm sure you will resonate with this. Probably the number one question I get asked my entire friggin career is people writing in to say, "Hey, such and such, my utility or some firm or some company is offering me these voluntary offsets. Are they worth it? Is it worth it doing this?" And I've been meaning forever and ever and ever to do something squarely on offsets, because what I always want to tell people is, like, "No, they're kind of junkie," but I don't want to exaggerate or stereotype. And I thought maybe I was missing some nuances.
So then I read your paper and realized I was missing a bunch of nuances, but they're all nuances. Showing that offsets are way worse than I imagined. Far worse than I had even dreamed. So let's get into it. Let's just start, though, in case any listeners out there don't know exactly what we're talking about. Just what is a carbon offset? And there's two basic kinds the sort of mandatory kind and the voluntary kind just run real quick through what an offset is.
Joe Romm
Sure. Well, I use a definition from the General Accounting Office: Reductions of greenhouse gas emissions from an activity in one place to compensate for emissions elsewhere. So a typical transaction is the developed country or a company, instead of reducing its own CO2 emissions, pays a developing country to reduce its emissions by an equivalent amount instead. And then if the buyer purchases enough offsets, they've been going around calling themselves carbon neutral or net zero. And I would say the interaction that most people have had with offsets, the most common one is when you're buying an airline ticket and you sort of have that option to spend a few dollars
