Quite a few years ago, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), a California power company, let you sign up for a carbon offset program. They would add an extra fee to your bill equivalent to the amount of carbon used, and give that to some carbon offset program. After some years, they ended that program, I think because they couldn’t find enough (or any) legitimate carbon offset organizations.
Which brings us to today, and my question: is there ANY carbon offset program that a normal person can contribute money to, that legitimately offsets carbon use? I’ve heard about tree planting organizations, but how do you know they planted them? Even worse, the “Give me money and we WON’T cut down this forest” organizations, which have so many options for corruption that I don’t consider them legitimate.
Are there any options for a normal person to sequester carbon (through donations)?
Thanks,
J.
In a word, no. Most carbon offset programs are essentially legal scams that just use clever accounting to move carbon emissions from one side of a ledger to another without any physical effort to actually remove or abate atmospheric carbon emissions. Even programs that do actually make real efforts to absorb or offset (i.e. reduce in other areas) emissions are based upon nonsensical premises. For instance, efforts to plant trees or renew wetlands work under the assumption that future carbon dioxide absorption will counteract emissions today, whereas in reality those current emissions are driving ever higher atmospheric carbon levels right now with the attendant effects on climate and ocean heating. “Offsetting” that through some hypothetical future reductions is irrelevant—even if you believe the often exaggerated estimates—because the damage to the ecosystem and inexorable movement into permanent changes to glacial ice sheets, release of methane from thawing of permafrost, and changing of climate-driving ocean currents is happening right now. It is like living your life on credit under the assumption that your ‘investment’ in lottery tickets will let you pay off all of that debt when you win the Powerball.
If there were an easy way to “offset” emissions at some marginal cost we would be doing it en masse because it would be way cheaper than the economic impact we’re already seeing with extreme weather, forest and grassland megafires, the die-off of marine life, loss of agricultural yields from drought and temperature extremes, et cetera. But there is no easy solution, either through ‘markets’ or by some techno-fairydust solution to magically suck greenhouse gases out of the air and bottle them up in some yet to be defined reservoir. Carbon offsets are just another in a long line of fabulation to avoid discussing the dire projections and impacts of permanent alterations to the global climate system which are occurring.
Stranger
What you can do is buy emissions rights certificates in a jurisdiction that has a carbon emissions trading scheme in place. The idea behind such schemes is that an aggregate amount of carbon emissions is defined, and this aggregate is then divided among polluters in the form of emission rights. These rights are transferable, the idea being that transferability will create a secondary market in emissions that ensures the emission cuts are shifted to the cheapest avoider. If you buy and retire active emission rights, that means someone else will have to cut emissions (or face a hefty penalty for polluting without having the required amount of certificates).