The problems with Carbon Offsetting for Travel

As you saw in our Guide to Carbon Offsets, we remain sceptical about the whole process and believe there is a muchbetter alternative to offsetting.

The problems with carbon offsetting generally are caught up in a wider, rather complex debate about Carbon Credits and Carbon Trading mechanisms. At an individual level however, we think the main problems with putting your hard earned money into carbon offsetting programs are these:

Tackles guilt, not the problem.
The classic argument – you can be 'carbon neutral' without making any meaningful actual reductions or changes to your carbon guzzling, globe trotting behaviour. That's nice, but sadly not true. Your emissions still hit the atmosphere. At best, you just happen to have paid for emissions somewhere else to not go out, or for your emissions to be removed again at some indefined point in the future. Maybe.

Money for nothin'?
There is no single standard to ensure that the carbon credits that are bought are resulting in genuine carbon reductions and long term investments in new technologies. Many carbon offset projects have been exposed to not actually be achieving anything, perhaps other than earning their shareholders a tidy profit.

They could be totally unsuitable projects imposed on people and places where they are totally unwanted. Consider the example of low energy light bulbs being handed out across South African shanty towns, to people who desperately needed something other than new light bulbs, who could not afford to replace them when they broke, and where electricity was only intermittently available anyway.

It's only one example, but look at the problems commonly associated with reforestation schemes. Planting trees seems like a sensible idea in theory – they will soak up the carbon your flight released for years to come. Unfortunately the reality is that they are simply not a viable way of tackling carbon emissions levels. For a start, the time lag between buying your ‘offset’ and the tree actually growing up and working its magic is pretty significant. That of course assumes that it won’t die before that, and also assumes that by some miracle the off setter was actually able to reliably calculate how many trees were actually needed in the first place, which is something scientists agree is almost impossible. What’s more, while releasing fossil fuels is permanent, carbon captured in trees is only ever temporary anyway. It is released through fire, disease, climate changes, natural decay and in harvesting – all common concerns for the average tree.

To combat this problem, ‘The Gold Standard’ is fast becoming a recognised benchmark standard.

Make new problems
Many offsetting projects have brought about a number of other local environmental and social problems. Lets look at a few:

Tree plantations subsidised by offsetting: they have a long list of problems including damaging natural habitats and diversity, and fuelling land disputes and exploitation of locals.

Bio fuels: Turning crops into oil sounds great, but the reality has often been far from it. It often encourages deforestation to make way for large mono crop developments. This not only releases carbon but also fuels land disputes, destroys biodiversity and the homes and livelihoods of animals and humans.

The bigger picture of carbon offsetting
On a wider global scale, carbon offsets bought from projects in the developing world count towards a developed countries emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol and various emissions trading schemes. This reduces all incentive or requirement to make real structural changes to the economies of the developed world. The Friend of the Earth report deals excellently with this and many other problems associated with carbon trading and carbon offsetting as a mechanism for global carbon reduction. We also found the Carbon Offset Research and Education website to be excellent.

The Alternative? Donate.

Donating to appropriate charities working to reduce carbon emissions and develop clean alternatives seem to us to be a muchbetter alternative to carbon offsetting. For us, that means donating to the Converging World.