The inconvenient truth about the carbon offset industry

It is 20 months now since British Airways proudly announced a new scheme to deal with climate change: for the first time, passengers could offset their share of the carbon produced by any flight by paying for the same amount of carbon to be taken out of the atmosphere elsewhere. “I welcome warmly this move from BA,” said the then environment minister, Elliot Morley.

And how much carbon has BA offset from the estimated 27m tonnes which its planes have fired into the air since that high-profile moment in September 2005? The answer is less than 3,000 tonnes, less than 0.01% of its emissions – substantially less than the carbon dispersed by a single day of its flights between London and New York.
The problem with offsetting is twofold. First, these schemes are unregulated and wide open to fraud. There is nothing but the customer’s canniness to stop a company claiming to be running a scheme which does not exist; claiming wildly exaggerated carbon cuts; selling offsets that have already been sold; charging hugely inflated prices. EasyJet, the cut-price airline, backed out of offsetting in April on the grounds that “there are too many snake-oil salesmen in the business”.

Second, as all the examples above show, even the most well-intentioned schemes suffer from basic weaknesses in the idea of carbon offsetting – an idea which flows not from environmentalists and climate scientists trying to design a way to reverse global warming but from politicians and business executives trying to meet the demands for action while preserving the commercial status quo. It fails on at least three essential points.

Guardian