Q: Do I need to purchase offsets to cover my air travel?
In recent years, research has shown that many offset projects are ineffective or worse. But last time we checked, people are still flying. A lot. And the planet is still warming. A lot.
You may still be wondering: Should I compensate for my air travel? If so, how?
What exactly are offsets?
A carbon offset is a credit you can buy to offset your emissions. So if you fly from New York to San Francisco, releasing about 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, you can buy an offset, funding a project that will remove or store that same amount of carbon dioxide somewhere else, often by planting or preserving trees. .
At least that’s the idea. But many scientists oppose it in principle, on the grounds that we need to dramatically reduce emissions, not simply try to cancel them.
“Offsetting is a misnomer,” said Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project at the University of California, Berkeley. “It creates a fiction that you can fly and emit greenhouse gases and just pay these cheap credits and that erases your impact.”
About $1.7 billion in carbon credits were issued worldwide last year, according to an analysis by global accounting firm KPMG.
OK. But do they work?
Companies are working on ways to improve the credibility of carbon credits. But Dr. Haya has been studying trade-offs for more than 20 years and so far, she said, the results have been discouraging. “Most credits do not represent the amount of emissions reductions they claim,” she said. Others have seen no measurable climate benefits.
This is because measuring the carbon captured, for example, when planting a new tree is difficult. Would that tree have been planted anyway? What happens if that tree then burns in a forest fire?
John Sterman, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Climate Pathways Project, compared carbon credits to the magical healing elixirs of the Old West. “I could put anything in that bottle. And it’s not just that it might not work: it could be downright harmful. “That’s where we find carbon offsets,” he stated. “They are deceiving people.”