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OFFSETS CAUGHT OFFSIDE

ANDREW SIMMS

FREDDIE DALEY

| 13th December 2022 |
CREATIVE COMMONS 4.0

Farsnews.ir / Creative Commons 4.0
The Men’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar is promoted as the first 'fully carbon neutral
FIFA World Cup tournament'. But this has been a PR own goal. 

> Offsetting is a bit like trying to give up smoking by paying someone else to
> bake a cake. It fails to compare like for like.



The 'get out of jail free card' was the board game Monopoly’s gift to the
English language, and it is how big polluters seem to view carbon offsetting.

But offsetting is a claimed solution to the pollution pushing global heating
that can actually make the problem worse.

Perhaps that should come as no surprise, as the irony is matched by Monopoly
itself, a game invented by Quakers to teach the evils of rentier capitalism that
became a celebration of rampant property and wealth accumulation.

Competition

The Men’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar was promoted as the first “fully carbon
neutral FIFA World Cup tournament”.  This claim, made before the tournament had
even begun, depended on questionable carbon accounting tricks and extensive use
of offsetting.

Yet both have been called-out for lacking scientific credibility, transparency,
and integrity. Rising awareness of the climate emergency means many in the world
of sport - clubs, events, and fans - and far beyond, are turning to offsetting
as a well-intentioned, or just convenient way to compensate for the impact of
their carbon emissions.

But, it wasn’t even as if FIFA or Qatar were promising to do the offsetting
themselves, partly they just provided fans and players with ideas on how to cut
their carbon footprint in their everyday lives.

Travelling fans were also invited to voluntarily offset their flight emissions,
even though few typically do and flight offset schemes known to be deeply
flawed.

But even direct efforts by FIFA were little better. The competition claimed to
offset emissions by purchasing carbon credits through a non-standard carbon
market initiative set up specifically for the Qatar World Cup, the Global Carbon
Council.

Smoking

This claims it will support renewable energy projects in the region that
displace fossil fuel generation, but for many of these projects it highly likely
that they’d have been built anyway, meaning that the purchasing of carbon
credits does little to reduce overall emissions.

A tree and turf nursery were also set up in the desert to capture carbon,
produce trees for stadium exteriors, and grass for the pitches and training
grounds.

But tree plantations used for offsetting have already been shown to burn down
during forest fires, in heatwaves set to be more common and intense in a warming
world.

In this smouldering cloud, a ‘fossil fuels’ for trees swap is exchanging stable,
reliable carbon storage for something that can easily go up in smoke – it’s
basically a kind of carbon laundering.

> Offsetting is a bit like trying to give up smoking by paying someone else to
> bake a cake. It fails to compare like for like.

Offsetting is a bit like trying to give up smoking by paying someone else to
bake a cake. It fails to compare like for like.

Procurement

Using stable stores of fossil carbon from the geosphere will not be ‘cancelled
out’ by planting a tree that may, or may not grow, whose lifespan is uncertain,
and could fall victim to drought, flood, or blight.

Baking a cake may be a good thing to do in itself, but it's unlikely to help you
quit cigarettes. Similarly, planting a tree will not make up for the real,
long-lived impacts of carbon emissions released into a saturated atmosphere now.

The problem is that offsetting in its current form simply does not do what the
name implies. Due to a mix of scientific and practical problems, offsetting
often doesn’t work at all, and can even make the problem worse.

The theory goes that through offsets, organisations, events or individuals,
effectively ‘erase’ or ‘cancel out’ the emissions that arise from their on-going
activities, whether it’s from transport, constructing stadiums, or powering
facilities.

Following this logic, organisations can purchase additional offsets to reduce
their ‘overall’ impact, thereby making it possible to claim absolute reductions
in their emissions and environmental impact when, in reality, they have made no
adjustments to their habits, behaviour, operations, procurement process, or
organisational structures.

Pillar

This theory, however, quickly collapses in the face of the climate crisis.

Under the latest climate models produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), limiting global heating to 1.5°C requires global
emissions to peak before 2025 and be cut by 43 per cent by 2030, reaching
net-zero in the early 2050s.

According to the IPCC, to achieve these temperature goals, global emissions need
to fall by around 90 per cent, while various types of carbon removal will be
relied upon to deliver just the other 10 per cent of required reductions.

On a basic level, relying on carbon offsetting instead of pursuing emissions
cuts at source is simply out of touch with the science. But, it runs into big
problems on several other levels too.

Offsetting has become a central pillar of corporate sustainability strategies,
net-zero pledges, and national governments’ climate policy programmes too.

Wildlife

Household names like EasyJet, Heathrow Airport, BP, and Shell all heavily rely
on offsetting schemes to ‘cancel out’ their operational emissions, appear as
environmentally friendly, and claim carbon neutrality.

Implicitly they are heavily relied on in national climate plans, and used
patchily by consumers to assuage consciences guilty, for example, at taking long
haul flights.

Carbon offsets are big business and the global market is set to balloon in size
as an ever-increasing number of organisations seek to claim carbon neutrality.

According to analysts, the demand for carbon offsets will increase by a factor
of 15 or more by 2030 and by a factor of up to 100 by 2050.

By 2050, the global carbon market could increase to a value of $200 billion.
There are concerns that demand for offsets will outstrip supply by as early as
2024, with new monoculture forestries putting immense pressures on land,
communities, and wildlife.

Popular

Also, through offsetting projects and common, but controversial, emissions
bookkeeping methods, known as ‘market-based accounting’, organisations can claim
vast reductions in planet-warming emissions without transforming their
operations, partnerships, or governance.

To illustrate this point, look no further than Cisco Systems, one of the largest
tech conglomerates in the world that employs nearly 80,000 people.

In 2021, Cisco claimed triumphantly that they had cut their pollution across
scope 1 & 2 (those emissions that are ‘owned’ or ‘controlled’ by the company) by
60 per cent over the past 15 years.

But when these claims were assessed through a different accounting method, which
excluded the offset and renewable credits purchased by Cisco, the picture is
entirely different: emissions climbed by 22 per cent.

A number of offsetting mechanisms are popular and set to dominate the global
carbon offsetting market in the years ahead.

Divert

These include nature-based offsets - a category that uses plants, trees,
forests, soil, or the ocean to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it.

Depending on the offset project in question, this approach can, in theory, also
protect and conserve ecosystems that are considered carbon sinks, such as
rainforests and peat bogs, and embrace rewilding schemes. In 2019, nature-based
offsets made up over half (56.4 per cent) of the voluntary offset market.

Then there are renewable energy offsets that seek to maintain or increase
renewable energy generation, ultimately displacing fossil fuel use and therefore
preventing carbon emissions being emitted in the first place. In 2019, renewable
energy projects made up 21.3% of voluntary offset markets.

Cash is being made - but huge questions remain over their credibility,
transparency and integrity.

Even some of the more traditionally cautious organisations are sceptical about
the role of offsets. The International Energy Agency (IEA) stated in 2021 that,
“there is likely to be a limited supply of emissions credits consistent with
net-zero emissions globally and the use of such credits could divert investment
from options that enable direct emissions reductions.”

Six ways that offsetting leaves us locked in climate jail

 1. Offsetting doesn’t work

In its current form scientific evidence suggests that offsetting doesn’t deliver
on its promises. One study for the EU Commission found that 85% of the offset
projects under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) failed to actually
reduce emissions, and that only 2% of had a high likelihood of doing so. Some
big corporate offsetting schemes have been ravaged by the very climate impacts
they are meant to push back. In 2021, as record-breaking wildfires engulfed
California, Oregon, and Washington in the USA, forest offsets bought by
Microsoft and fossil fuel major BP were destroyed These occurrences are not
rare. Since 2015, wildfires in California have damaged six forest offset buffer
projects, releasing between 5.7 million and 6.8 million tonnes of carbon back
into the atmosphere, according to CarbonPlan.

 2. Schemes can cause real harm

Offset projects can be harmful both in terms of direct failure, and also due to
the impact of projects on local communities, economies, and the natural world.
There are multiple examples of nature-based offsetting schemes being implemented
without regard to the legal or customary land use rights of local people. These
poor quality and shoddily implemented offset schemes have been shown to lead to
human rights abuses, adverse effects on biodiversity and are less likely to
provide long-term stores of carbon emissions. One common example is when native
forests brimming with biodiversity are cut down to make way for fast-growing
eucalyptus plantations, creating monocultures, devoid of wildlife, that can pull
groundwater away from local communities and disrupt agriculture.

 3. Offsetting is a form of carbon laundering

Attempting to offset the burning of stable stores of fossil carbon by planting
unstable stores like trees, that face multiple threats in our warming world, is
not swapping like-for-like. Scientists believe that it will take close to half a
million years for a tonne of CO2 emissions released today through the burning of
fossil fuels to be removed from the atmosphere naturally. This hard scientific
truth runs right to the heart of the offsetting predicament: to effectively undo
emissions, offsetting mechanisms must remain in place for hundreds of thousands
of years. The average contract for a tree planting offset scheme, however, is
around 40 years.

 4. The system can be gamed

Through accounting tricks and murky carbon markets, offsets can be misallocated
on a mass scale, which often means there is no reduction in overall emissions.
It is very difficult to prove that renewable projects would not have been built
anyway. Research from Berkeley, Oxford, and Carbon Plan found that up to 85 per
cent of offsets sold today are not additional, which means the sale of these
credits has no impact on reducing emissions.

 5. It provides an excuse for ‘pollution as usual’

Offsetting can justify and legitimise the status quo, allowing organisations to
continue polluting while claiming leadership and progress on sustainable and
environmental issues. Relying on offsets allowed one company, mentioned above,
Cisco systems, to claim a 60% cut in emissions, when their actual emissions had
risen 22%. By analysing the carbon credits allocated to 1,350 wind farms across
India, researchers found that at least 52% of approved carbon credits were
allocated to projects that would have been built anyway. The researchers
concluded that “in addition to wasting scarce resources, we estimate that the
sale of these offsets to regulate polluters has substantially increased global
carbon dioxide emissions.”

 6. Offsets inhibits real change

The cost and apparent convenience of offsetting means that the more challenging
structural decisions required to address an organisation’s climate impact may be
delayed. As an approach, offsetting is the flawed, temporary fix that by default
becomes the main response to the problem. Especially where the wealthy are
concerned, whether nations, corporations or individuals, if you can buy your way
out of actually changing behaviour, why change at all? Thinking they are a
realistic option for more systemic change, when they aren’t, restricts our
thinking, creativity and ambition to find genuine ways to thrive in a bounded
biosphere.

Get out of jail?

It’s clear that offsets cannot break the carbon pollution bonds currently
locking humanity and the rest of the natural world into the brutal upheaval of a
warming world.

In the race to decarbonise the global economy, if there is to be place for
offsets, however small, they need to live up to certain basic criteria.

The means to escape the jail of global heating every offset project must be:

1. A genuine addition to other efforts to reduce emissions - as in, the carbon
saving would not have happened without the scheme.

2. Permanent - carbon must be stored on a permanent basis to have ‘offset’
status – not, for example in an ecosystem that, due to warming, could flip from
being a store to source.

3. Supported by local people - far too many projects disrupt and damage
surrounding communities, so ensuring and maintaining local support is key.

4. Used only for residual emissions as a last resort: offsets must not be used
to allow organisations to continue business-as-usual without transforming their
internal operations, or individuals there behaviours. 

These Authors

Andrew Simms is co-director of the New Weather Institute, coordinator of
the Rapid Transition Alliance, an author on new and green economics, and
co-author of the original Green New Deal. Follow on: t. @AndrewSimms_uk m.
@andrewsimms@indieweb.social

Freddie Daley is a researcher at the University of Sussex, and works with Cool
Down – the sport for climate action network, a network of sports organisations
calling for climate action in and through sport,

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