Why carbon offsets are a bad idea (sometimes)
By: Jesper Hyldahl Fogh
Tags: Carbon Emissions, Climate Change, Flight, Carbon Offset, Climate Crisis

The greenhouse gas emissions of a plane trip changes depending who you ask

1. You can’t always trust emissions calculations

When you want to compensate for your airplane trip, you need to know how much greenhouse gas has actually been emitted by your trip. If you’re purchasing directly from an airline, they might calculate this automatically based on your itinerary, but if you go to a third-party site, like MyClimate or atmosfair, you have to fill out an online form about your trip. However, you will get different results from different providers. There is no agreed upon standard for calculating your flight emissions. It all depends on a variety of factors, and some of these factors are given by ICAO, an organization that unites all commercial airlines. Other factors, though, are up for interpretation. These factors, however, make all the difference, and commercial airlines will often exclude them, since it reflects poorly on them, if the emissions attributed to a flight are large. In the other end of the spectrum, you have atmosfair and MyClimate, who feature very transparent and realistic calculations. But the issue is then that you are locked into purchasing offsets from those providers. All of this is just when we’re looking at flight emission calculators. Don’t even get me started on footprint calculators and carbon neutral weddings. Now, secondly…

2. Carbon offsets are not always certified

As described in my previous post, offset certifications have come a long way since the late 2000’s, but not all carbon offsets are certified. Some providers make it difficult to confirm if they are actually certified, which is a bad way to go, if you want to build trust with those looking to buy offsets. Some providers also bundle a handful of projects into one package, and then make it seem as if the entire package has been granted the same certification. Sometimes acquiring certifications is simply too expensive, and cumbersome for a provider.

Even if it was easy to figure out which certifications went with what offsets, understanding the different certifications is the next step. What’s the difference between Gold Standard and Gold Standard Micro? What about the UN Clean Development Mechanism? Is it reliable simply due to the fact that it’s a UN project? And why are there so few certified offset projects in developed countries? In short, certifications are a mess, and someone needs to clean it up. And finally…

Simply offsetting our own emissions is not enough in the long haul, but it can help us in the short term

3. Carbon offsets can only take us so far

At the end, there is perhaps the biggest issue with carbon offsets: it’s not a silver bullet to fix climate change. If we imagine that all the industrialized countries stopped reducing their emissions and instead just offset everything, we would not reach the goals of the Paris agreement. This is a notion that, while correct in the grand scheme of things, is a bit misunderstood, and stops carbon offsets from reaching their full potential. For instance, purchasing offsets in climate friendly technologies increases demand, and subsequently interest. Not to mention that certain offsets are also beneficial in other ways than emissions reductions. As an example, Gold Standard projects have historically been shown to deliver $21–177 in additional value towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals per tonne of carbon offset.