Photo by Guy Bowden on Unsplash
Today, you don’t have to look far to find companies boasting about their plans to reach net zero or become carbon neutral. Amazon says it wants to reach net zero by 2040. Shell says they’ll do it by 2050, as does the airline industry. And if you listened to the recent presentation by Apple, you might be led to believe the tech giant is single-handedly going to save the planet. Countries have also jumped on the trend. For instance, the UK promises to reach net zero by 2050 despite backtracking on many of its green policies.
Going ‘net zero’ means just what it sounds like. It’s a pledge not to increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. In practice, that means reducing emissions and ‘cancelling out’ emissions by purchasing carbon offsets or utilizing a combination of both.
For businesses where reducing emissions to zero seems impractical, using carbon offsets seems like the next best thing. It sure sounds great on paper, but do carbon offsets work? Or are they just another greenwashing tactic allowing corporations to keep on polluting?
How carbon offsets work (or don’t)
The idea behind carbon offsets is fairly simple. First, a company, country, organization, or individual calculate their carbon footprint. Then, they invest in projects that reduce or “offset” an equal amount of carbon as they produce. For instance, they might pay someone to protect a forest, plant trees, catch gas emissions from a landfill, or invest in solar farming.
Dozens of companies such as Finite Carbon and Climeworks now sell these offsets, funding thousands of green projects worldwide. It’s a big business, currently valued at over $2 billion. And with more companies pledging net zero, the market is expected to grow tenfold, with some expert predictions suggesting the market will be worth $250 billion by 2050.
The ‘magic’ of the offsets market is that it allows money to flow to the projects that are cheapest, theoretically enabling emissions to be cut faster. But if the climate crisis has taught us one thing, it’s that where there is money involved, corruption isn’t far…