Why carbon offsets are worse than you think

Carbon offsets sound so promising: If you emit some CO2, you can just pay someone else to reduce that amount somewhere else, and you’re good! But is it too good to be true?

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

#PlanetA #CarbonOffset #CarbonOffsetting

Reporter: Kiyo Dörrer
Camera: Henning Goll
Video Editor: David Jacobi
Supervising Editor: Joanna Gottschalk

Read More:

Carbon Offset Guide by the Stockholm Environment Institute:

Study on the effectivity of mandatory carbon offsets:

Market Report on voluntary carbon markets:

Study on the effectivity of carbon offsets among Indian wind power projects:

Investigation on Cambodian rain forest conservation:

Special thanks to: Lambert Schneider, Raphael Calel and Grant Rosoman for background interviews.

0:00 Intro
1:05 What are carbon offsets?
2:10 Carbon offsets in action
5:58 Scale and scope of offsets
6:55 Problems with carbon offsets
8:19 Additionality of offsets
10:24 Leakage and double counting
13:39 Solutions

[DWPlanetA]

Have you ever bought a carbon offset - or if not, would you buy one now?

[SlabtheKiller]

I've used to buy them a few years ago, but then I thought that my money would only make the company that is offsetting look better (like when big corporations ask for your change for charity). If I want to offset carbon emissions I do it by directly funding these projects, not through a multibillion company.

[zoezacinakayak]

In a part of Australia that I grew up in, they bulldozed thousands of hectares of forest and healthy bush to plant monoculture tree forests for "carbon credits" back in early 2000's. I've never seen carbon offsets as a positive thing after this

[devinelgert]

Carbon offsets: the modern version of medieval indulgences.

[GergC]

It should be noted that nature-based offsetting methods, like tree planting and peat bog re-wetting etc often take yeeeaaars to start actually offsetting any significant amount of carbon (trees need to grow, peat bog has an incredibly slow metabolism), then once they do start offsetting, they need to pay off the carbon debt from planting them first, THEN they can actually start working on the emissions created by a corporation or whatever. But by that time, it could be decades in the future and we don't have that timescale to fight the climate crisis. The reason corporations are jumping on offsetting is because it's cheap and they don't have to change their behaviour. It's not because it's a truly effective way of solving climate change.

[boneillsa]

I looked into buying carbon offsets years ago, but the low price left me suspicious. Recently I've studied sustainability and found myself deeply suspicious of most corporate activities in this realm: the big emitters are the ones writing the rules about how we should count carbon and decarbonise. Otherwise, why would it be so complicated? Complicated is hard to solve. It's time to change who writes the rules of the conversation.

[ZrJiri]

I think individual carbon offsetting (by consumers and companies) is actively harmful. It makes people feel like they are doing something to reduce their impact, which makes them less motivated to do the thing we actually need and change their lifestyle. It provides an easy cop-out for high emission companies, since they can just charge customers for their "climate action" without doing anything about their emissions.

[borneobill]

A good job of presenting a complex topic. One update: with the agreement on Article 16 at Glasgow, it is now possible to avoid double counting by buying only "authorized" carbon offsets. These are subtracted from a country's Nationally Determined Commitments, so there ahould be no double counting.
Also, regarding permanence, forests may be damaged by fires, but they do grow back. The permanence of forest offests relies on commitments to good forest management. Of course that can be reversed. But is "keep-it-in-the-ground" any more permanent? It only takes one Trump to reverse those commitments, and then the carbon will not return underground by itself.

[singha]

Kiyo Dorrer is a great presenter who can talk about such complex subjects and make them totally understandable

[extremelymad]

I have never researched this topic properly, but thanks to your video it's got more clear. Probably I'll consider offsetting my GHG emissions if particular program is verifiable and looks trustworthy.

[jackwarren]

It's a real shame that noone from Gold or Verra was interviewed for this. They would have provided much detail on the methodologies used to measure carbon offset, and also the mitigations set in place to insure against forest fires, corruption, damage, etc.

They may have provided a more clear explanation in how these public registries avoid double counting. Essentially every tonne recognised by these standards is logged. When they get retired/discontinued, they cannot be discontinued against a second emitter's emissions.

All public domain and a powerful tool since the wild west days of early carbon offsetting.

Absolutely though, reduce first. There frankly isn't enough offset projects around to mitigate everything, and they often take years to go live!

[techcafe]

carbon offsets seem like an elaborate way for polluters to keep on polluting whilst gaming the system and pretending to care about the planet.

[MrGilang]

Coming as someone who lives in Indonesia, i love that almost every videos on climate and/or inequality always put the blames mainly on the big corporations and not the usually corrupt government on the global south. I get it, to the western audience the overarching influences of big corporations is the main societal issues that need to be dealt with, but, due to the disproportionate influence of western media to the global south, it creates the situation where the local corrupt government can still doing their same corrupt way while yelling "ThIs iS ThE wAlL StReEt fAuLt". Im not suggesting that the companies should not be blamed, im suggesting to introduce the context on how most of global sout government works to know that people or at least the governments in global south has some agency in the problem regarding climate and/or inequality.

[eerojarviluoma]

I think a question that should be asked when offsetting carbon is this: For how long is the carbon going to remain offset? Who can guarantee that this swamp project for example will remain in this state for 100 years or 500 years? Wont the man made dams trapping the water eventually erode away? Considering all sorts of natural and human made changes like forest fires, erosion, world wars, etc. I have hard time believing that almost any of these compensation projects successfully keep the carbon stored for extended timeframes (hundreds of years), unless it's literally pumped back to Earths crust where it came from. I get the feeling we are just kicking the can forward with these compensation projects. I'd spend my money elsewhere.

[GoGreenPost]

As someone who has worked on creating carbon offset standards and accounting methodologies, a few things that come to mind. First, the content here is well informed and explained. Second, we have to keep in mind that carbon offsets are not the problem, it's the guidelines put in place that allow projects to become carbon offset projects that are the problem. In the video there is mention of 85% of projects under global standards not actually offsetting carbon. These standards have since been removed for this reason. This all brings me to my last thought, which is, if you are careful and purchase carbon offsets from projects that have gone through proper evaluation, they are an amazing tool to immediately stop atmospheric carbon emissions from getting any higher. Its then up to us to lower our emissions at the same time.

[richdobbs]

Destruction of surplus industrial gases shouldn't happen because of carbon offsets. It should be part of the cradle-to-grave responsibility of the manufacturer. Heck you folks have large deposits to drive recycling of PET bottles. Can't you do the same for this issue?

[kenjohnson]

@13:25 "The IPCC calculations show that it will be extremely hard to reach our climate targets without some form of offsets."

What the IPCC says is that it will be difficult or impossible to achieve our climate targets without negative emissions. Offsets, by definition, don't reduce carbon emissions; they are just a shell game that moves emissions from one source to another -- generally from the most expensive to the least expensive marginal reductions. The problem is, those cheap reductions can't get us to net-zero, let alone net-negative; we're still going to have to make the more difficult and expensive emission cuts, which will likely be much more expensive -- or impossible -- without early action. Offsets are are a form of institutionalized procrastination and delay -- just kick the can down the road.

Contributing to bonafide emission reduction projects should be encouraged as "charitable contributions" without any expectation that they can "offset" or avoid the need to make emission reductions elsewhere. You can't clean up the garbage by just moving it from one side of the street to the other.

[JustRupes]

Thank you for this, it has confirmed what I had long suspected. I use to buy carbon credits for my small one man IT business. It was once I had looked into carbon credits I decided the best solution was simply to look at investing the money into more efficient systems and reducing our carbon foot print by producing less power hungry solutions, shutting down systems that were not in use. Also I have started promoting reusing old equipment instead of buying low budget systems to prevent systems going into landfill for as long as possible. We have some computer systems still in use 12 years down the road and still being productive. We also upgrade just what we need to upgrade, so if someone wants a new system but have an old one, we often reuse as much as possible to make that happen. So much IT equipment just gets binned after 3 years it's ridiculous. Simple upgrades can keep that system out of landfill for at least twice that time, often three to four times the projected life span. Just because something is old does not mean it's useless.

This is also why the right to repair projects are so important.

[SaveMoneySavethePlanet]

Any time someone asks me if they should purchase carbon offsets I always say: “is there really nothing you can do to ACTUALLY lower your carbon footprint?”

Once you’ve worked hard to reduce your fossil fuel usage as low as possible then sure, buy carbon offsets. But I’ve potentially reduced my emissions from 10 tons to 7 tons just by changing my diet, electricity usage, and transportation method. And I have plans to push to go lower.

Much better then buying something online which may or may not be real in my opinion.

[lorenzoblum]

Thank you DW for pointing out this greenwashing.
The only solution is :
REDUCE, Reuse, Repair, Redistribute, Ride (a Real bicycle), Replant, Reconsider, Recycle, Rejoice...
Btw, the carbon footprint of the military industrial complex anybody?