CommentHow I learned to stop worrying and love (or tolerate) carbon offsets

Two years ago, I faced a difficult decision. My university voted and then publicly pledged to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2040 and 75% by 2025. I went to vote wearing my windmill tie for good luck, and had argued loudly that our emissions reductions should come from using renewable energy and ending fossil fuel use, not by buying carbon offsets (paying someone else to reduce emissions on your behalf). Like many scientists and environmentalists, I thought offsets were almost worse than doing nothing.

The “no offsetting” argument won out. By 2023, we had reduced emissions by almost 50%. But some unexpected obstacles made our 2025 target temporarily unattainable. Should I change course? It was time to address the offsetting controversy.

Compensation payments are a lightning rod in the climate debate, but the idea is attractive because the climate does not react to where CO2 comes from the atmosphere, just how much of it is in the air. If you can pay $10 per ton to remove CO2 from the air or prevent it from being emitted, that is 10 times better than the $100 per ton option. We want our climate dollars to get the most for their money.

The problem is not theory, but practice. Using forest compensation payments as an example, the following aspects need to be considered: additionality (did your payment really prevent deforestation?), longevity (will the forest be cut down next year?), loss (did the landowner cut down the forest next door?) and equity (who bears the costs/who gets the payment?). In fact, recent analyses show that many forest compensation projects do not actually reduce deforestation.

For these and other reasons, many environmentalists oppose carbon offsets because they mean continuing to burn fossil fuels while paying a pittance for projects that do nothing. When I told a journalist friend that I was writing an editorial on carbon offsets, she sent me an article titled “Carbon offsets are a scam.” That pretty much sums up what most of my students and many of my colleagues think.

Until 2023, I was mostly on their side. Now I think I was wrong. Emissions reductions must be at the heart of climate action, but offsetting measures should probably also be part of the toolbox. Let me explain why.

The first step for any organization, from a university to a country, is to set an emissions reduction roadmap to reduce emissions to zero. But setting goals and knowing exactly how to achieve them are two very different things, especially when the challenge is as difficult and multifaceted as reaching zero emissions. In our case, we have switched to 100% renewable electricity from newly built projects. We have launched engineering studies to optimize our transition from burning fossil fuels for heating. We are electrifying our vehicle fleet and ground equipment, and changing the food we serve in the dining rooms to reduce the carbon footprint.

Even then, our emissions reductions would fall somewhat short of our first pledge. The question was not, “Should we buy offsets to avoid the hard work of making real changes?”, but, “Should we buy offsets in addition to everything else we do?”

This dilemma is not an isolated case; the majority of decision-makers who want to address climate change are faced with it. So let us take a moment to think about some of the benefits that offsetting measures bring, even in their current, imperfect form. First, voluntary offsetting measures are voluntarily. Most organizations are not required to reduce their emissions. Buying carbon credits puts a price on pollution that is free to blow into the air in most parts of the world. Importantly, contrary to the claim that carbon credits are only used to avoid emissions cuts, organizations that buy carbon credits also spend more on reducing their direct emissions than others in their industry, according to recent reports.

Second, we must realize that the offset market is in its infancy and the rules are still being worked out. You probably haven’t delved into the alphabet soup that is the offset market, but the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI), the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTI), the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), and others are working feverishly to correct past mistakes, often in the face of public criticism and internal disagreement. Academics are also weighing in, proposing new market models, advocating for transparency, and examining the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of past efforts. No one has all the answers, but these efforts are serious attempts to get things right.

Third, and most importantly, offsets can provide immediate emissions reductions when the physical reality of eliminating emissions is still a decade (or decades) away. Total emissions, not when we reach zero, will determine how hot our planet gets. Emissions reductions now are therefore more important for the climate than emissions reductions in the future. Offsets that do not deliver real emissions reductions are a waste of money, but offsets that slow the emissions tap today are of great value.

These reasons brought me back to our leadership team, this time in my solar panel tie, to argue that we should buy offsets. After thinking carefully about additionality, longevity, leakage, and equity, we decided on offsets generated by the destruction of abandoned chlorofluorocarbons (potent greenhouse gases banned by a global protocol in 1987 but still available for purchase). These offsets will allow us to reach our 75% reduction target and keep it there for ten years, which is almost enough time to transform our campus and stop burning fossil fuels. Am I 100% sure these offsets will fully offset the emissions from our campus furnaces? No. But we haven’t been able to get rid of the furnaces right away, so the offsets are a lot better than nothing.

In a perfect world, we would have started redeveloping our campus in 1990 and finished today. In that world, everyone could get the energy they need from low-cost, zero-emission sources, rapidly phase out emissions from agriculture, deforestation and industry, and secure livelihoods.

We don’t live in that world. No one knows how to fully solve climate change, and while we’re making great progress, it will still take some time. Offsetting allows significant amounts of capital to be deployed to keep carbon out of the atmosphere – capital that would otherwise go unused.

But the important thing is that we cannot rely on offsets forever. Any organisation that is serious about tackling climate change needs to switch to 100% renewable electricity, electrify vehicles, heat with high-efficiency electric heat pumps, switch to zero-emission production and reduce emissions in the supply chain. If they then buy offsets, that is not greenwashing. That means doing more, and that is what is needed to solve this terrible problem.