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The New York Times acknowledged this week that green carbon offset credits don't work and, although they "could eventually play an important role in fighting climate change," offsets are currently "too good to be true."
In a piece published Wednesday, Times climate reporter Maggie Astor reported that carbon offsets, largely used by airlines and other companies seeking to meet environmental goals of reducing net carbon emissions, often didn't come close to meeting their promised benefits.
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"Carbon offset programs have become ubiquitous. You’ve probably seen them as check-box options when booking flights: Click here to upgrade to a premium seat. Click here to cancel your greenhouse gas emissions," Astor wrote.
"It’s an appealing proposition — the promise that, for a trivial amount of money, you can go about your business with no climate guilt. But if it sounds too good to be true, that’s because, at least for now, it is," she added.
Astor noted that the purpose of such programs was to compensate for emitted emissions, such as from passenger airplanes, by funding actions that reduce or remove carbon, like planting trees.
She cited a Columbia Business School professor who argued that people who value purchasing carbon credits should continue to do so, but shouldn't "be under the illusion that, for every credit you buy, it’s absolutely 100 percent reducing emissions by an equal amount."
"Many offset projects do not even come close to 100 percent of the benefits they promise," Astor wrote, before referencing multiple studies showing carbon offset programs either "overstated" their reductions, "were unlikely to achieve their reduction claims," or were unable to be accurately measured.
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She wrote that some projects could fail "because of climate change itself," noting that 150,000 acres of California forest set aside under the state's carbon offset program had been destroyed by wildfires.
"The biggest problems are structural, related to something called additionality," Astor wrote.
"A carbon offset needs to fund reductions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. If you pay someone to preserve a grove, but they were never actually planning to cut it down, then you’re not offsetting your emissions," she added. "And it’s difficult to establish the facts in these cases with the level of confidence required for offset programs to work."
Astor reported that "the appeal of carbon offsets" is that people can continue living their lives in the same way they always have while still combating climate change, but some experts argued such an approach helped people "avoid reducing emissions at the source."
"The sorts of programs tied to offsets are, in themselves, worthwhile and even essential to mitigate the damage already done by decades of greenhouse gas emissions; the sticky part is using them to justify more emissions," she wrote.
"Even if we could precisely calculate how much carbon a new grove of trees would absorb, tying its planting to the release of more carbon would only keep levels steady, and we need them to go down," she added.
From left, Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., left, talks with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right, on stage after the Democratic presidential primary debate on Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2020. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
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Astor argued that for offset programs to be effective, they needed to be designed and administered differently than they are now, and that consumers would need to pay more than the amount they currently pay per ton of carbon dioxide.
"For now, the best thing an individual can do remains what it has always been: Try to emit less," she wrote.
Carbon offsets have been largely supported by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, but heavily utilized by left-wing Democrats. Last year, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan bill to incentive carbon offsets.
Progressive Democrats Sens. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., spent nearly $60,000 combined on offsets for travel during their 2020 presidential campaigns.