Whether for a company or an individual, a zero-emission lifestyle is hard to achieve. That’s why a market for “offsets” is surging – and controversial. Over the past couple of years, hundreds of corporations from Amazon to Visa have announced plans to move toward “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions.
Look more closely, though, and the promises also reflect something else: the growing prominence of a controversial environmental accounting tool generally known as “carbon offsets,” or “carbon credits.”
Supporters say these offsets are an important tool in the fight against global warming and also an increasingly important funding source for climate-friendly initiatives. Think of them as contracts that can be bought and sold, allowing projects that remove greenhouse gases to counteract emissions made somewhere else. Want to neutralize the impact of driving your gasoline-powered car? Carbon-offset programs make it seem as easy as ordering a mystery novel. Worried about the carbon impact of your flight? Offset programs say you can support a tree planting program in Bali to make up for it.
WHY WE WROTE THIS
Whether for a company or an individual, a zero-emission lifestyle is hard to achieve. That’s why a market for “offsets” is surging – and controversial. But critics argue the offsets don’t reflect progress at all and instead are a new form of greenwashing. They warn that offsets may actually slow the greenhouse gas reductions scientists say are necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change and are a distraction from the hard changes needed to decarbonize the economy.
They also criticize the voluntary offset market as unregulated and inconsistent – a situation policymakers have said they will try to address at the upcoming COP26 United Nations gathering on climate change in November.
“This is a messy area. There’s no question about it,” says Geoffrey Heal, an economics professor at Columbia University who focuses on the environment. “It hasn’t mattered until recently. But now the [voluntary offset] market is going to explode.”
Indeed, the carbon offset market appears poised for rapid growth. The Institute of International Finance’s task force on scaling voluntary carbon markets predicts that the demand for carbon credits will increase by a factor of 15 or more by 2030, and by a factor of up to 100 by 2050. Overall, it says, the carbon credit market could be worth more than $50 billion by 2030.
This summer, Michigan became the first U.S. state to develop a program to sell forestry-based offsets – pledging to manage a state forest in a way that will help pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
The carbon credit market is based on the premise that what matters for slowing climate change is the overall level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, not the reduction in any particular place. In other words, the Earth doesn’t care whether a reduction in carbon comes from changes within a Silicon Valley data center or from that data center restoring a mangrove forest in Brazil. Either way, there is less of the heat-trapping gas in the air.
Rogelio V. Solis/AP/File
A section of the Mississippi Power Co. plant in De Kalb, Mississippi, on Nov. 16, 2015, which was designed to burn gas derived from coal. Intended to pioneer the concept of “clean coal” using carbon capture technology, the project instead ran into repeated financial difficulties. It’s a symbol of how costly experiments in cleaning up fossil fuels can be.
The idea of exchanging carbon removal here for carbon emissions there is at the root of the “cap and trade” regulatory systems in Europe, California, and elsewhere. But it is only recently, says Peter Miller, director of the western region climate and clean energy program for the Natural Resources Defense Council, that it has become a focus of the private sector.
“With the acceleration of the climate crisis, there is a lot more interest in urgent action, both at the personal and the corporate level,” he says. “And one of the leading contenders for things people can do is to invest in offsets.”
But as Mr. Miller and many others point out, not all carbon credits are created equal. At this point, anyone can create an offset – all that’s needed is a willing buyer and seller. But whether that offset actually helps prevent climate change is a lot more complicated.
Much of this is because of how offsets work. There are very few projects that actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. (That process, called direct air capture, does exist, but it is still rare and relatively expensive.) More often, offsets promise to not release carbon. A forest-based offset program, for instance, claims to preserve trees that would otherwise be cut down. A clean power offset creates a wind turbine that wouldn’t have been built otherwise.
This concept is called “additionality,” and, as Cynthia Cummis of the World Resources Institute says, it is inherently difficult to prove.
“You’re always making an assessment based on a hypothetical scenario,” she says. “And I think that always will make you question what additional emission reductions are really being generated by a project.”
This is why it is important for companies to decarbonize their operations and value chains first, she says, and then use offsets only as a way to go “above and beyond.”
“There have been projects that people have looked into and found problems with and have damaged the reputation of the whole sector,” says Anastasia O’Rourke, managing director of the Yale Carbon Containment Lab at the Yale School of the Environment. Yet, she adds, “it doesn’t mean the whole thing is suspect.”
Dr. O’Rourke and others say there are ways to create viable offset programs that do, indeed, help reduce global carbon emissions. Although there are no legal requirements for proving the validity of voluntary offsets, there are a handful of prominent registries that claim to list only scientifically vetted and documented projects. There is also a growing ecosystem of private carbon offset developers, verifiers, and providers.
Bluesource, for instance, is a company that works with companies and organizations, from family farms to large corporations and global banks, to both develop offset programs and help reduce clients’ climate impact. This year, it announced that it had facilitated a partnership in which DTE, an energy company, would purchase offsets created by the Michigan Department of Natural Resource’s management of the Pigeon River Country State Forest. Rather than increase logging in the area, the state says, it will work with Bluesource to retain forest stock for its carbon absorbing potential.
To Kevin Townsend, Bluesource’s chief commercial officer, the project is an example of how offsets can bolster climate action and provide for other ecological benefits – and even, in this case, create a way for states to unlock new income streams.
The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Planet vs. Plastics” – a theme chosen to raise awareness of the damage done by plastic to humans, animals and the planet and to promote policies aiming to reduce global plastic production by 60 percent by 2040.
As our chart shows, global plastics use has increased rapidly over the past few decades, growing 250 percent since 1990 to reach 460 million tonnes in 2019, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook, which projects another 67-percent increase in global plastics use by 2040 and for the world’s annual plastic use to exceed one billion tonnes by 2052. As our chart shows, packaging is the largest driver of global plastics use, which is why a rapid phasing out of all single use plastics by 2030 is one of the policy measures proposed under EARTHDAY.ORG’s 60X40 framework.
Other major applications of plastics include building and construction, transportation as well as textiles, with the fast fashion industry particularly guilty of adding to the world’s plastic footprint. “The fast fashion industry annually produces over 100 billion garments,” the Earth Day organizers write. “Overproduction and overconsumption have transformed the industry, leading to the disposability of fashion. People now buy 60 percent more clothing than 15 years ago, but each item is kept for only half as long.” Most importantly, the organization points out that 85 percent of disposed garments end up in landfills or incinerators, while just 1 percent are being recycled.
Felix Richter is a Data Journalist
This article was first published in the Statista.com.
Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park. Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.
Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today. Instead, they portray a vibrant savannah inhabited by elephants, giraffes, rhinos and hippos. This rock art is an important record of the past environmental conditions that prevailed in the Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert.
These images depict a period approximately 6,000-11,000 years ago called the Green Sahara or North African Humid Period. There is widespread climatological evidence that during this period the Sahara supported wooded savannah ecosystems and numerous rivers and lakes in what are now Libya, Niger, Chad and Mali.
This greening of the Sahara didn’t happen once. Using marine and lake sediments, scientists have identified over 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. These greening events provided vegetated corridors which influenced species’ distribution and evolution, including the out-of-Africa migrations of ancient humans.
These dramatic greenings would have required a large-scale reorganisation of the atmospheric system to bring rains to this hyper arid region. But most climate models haven’t been able to simulate how dramatic these events were.
As a team of climate modellers and anthropologists, we have overcome this obstacle. We developed a climate model that more accurately simulates atmospheric circulation over the Sahara and the impacts of vegetation on rainfall.
We identified why north Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession – the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.
This caused warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, and warmer air is able to hold more moisture. This intensified the strength of the West African Monsoon system and shifted the African rainbelt northwards. This increased Saharan rainfall, resulting in the spread of savannah and wooded grassland across the desert from the tropics to the Mediterranean, providing a vast habitat for plants and animals.
Our results demonstrate the sensitivity of the Sahara Desert to changes in past climate. They explain how this sensitivity affects rainfall across north Africa. This is important for understanding the implications of present-day climate change (driven by human activities). Warmer temperatures in the future may also enhance monsoon strength, with both local and global impacts.
Earth’s changing orbit
The fact that the wetter periods in north Africa have recurred every 21,000 years or so is a big clue about what causes them: variations in Earth’s orbit. Due to gravitational influences from the moon and other planets in our solar system, the orbit of the Earth around the sun is not constant. It has cyclic variations on multi-thousand year timescales. These orbital cycles are termed Milankovitch cycles; they influence the amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun.
On 100,000-year cycles, the shape of Earth’s orbit (or eccentricity) shifts between circular and oval, and on 41,000 year cycles the tilt of Earth’s axis varies (termed obliquity). Eccentricity and obliquity cycles are responsible for driving the ice ages of the past 2.4 million years.
The third Milankovitch cycle is precession. This concerns Earth’s wobble on its axis, which varies on a 21,000 year timescale. The similarity between the precession cycle and the timing of the humid periods indicates that precession is their dominant driver. Precession influences seasonal contrasts, increasing them in one hemisphere and reducing them in another. During warmer Northern Hemisphere summers, a consequent increase in north African summer rainfall would have initiated a humid phase, resulting in the spread of vegetation across the region.
Eccentricity and the ice sheets
In our study we also identified that the humid periods did not occur during the ice ages, when large glacial ice sheets covered much of the polar regions. This is because these vast ice sheets cooled the atmosphere. The cooling countered the influence of precession and suppressed the expansion of the African monsoon system.
The ice ages are driven by the eccentricity cycle, which determines how circular Earth’s orbit is around the sun. So our findings show that eccentricity indirectly influences the magnitude of the humid periods via its influence on the ice sheets. This highlights, for the first time, a major connection between these distant high latitude and tropical regions.
The Sahara acts as a gate. It controls the dispersal of species between north and sub-Saharan Africa, and in and out of the continent. The gate was open when the Sahara was green and closed when deserts prevailed. Our results reveal the sensitivity of this gate to Earth’s orbit around the sun. They also show that high latitude ice sheets may have restricted the dispersal of species during the glacial periods of the last 800,000 years.
Our ability to model the African humid periods helps us understand the alternation of humid and arid phases. This had major consequences for the dispersal and evolution of species, including humans, within and out of Africa. Furthermore, it provides a tool for understanding future greening in response to climate change and its environmental impact.
Refined models may, in the future, be able to identify how climate warming will influence rainfall and vegetation in the Sahara region, and the wider implications for society.
Edward Armstrong is a postdoctoral research fellow, University of Helsinki
A new draft text on global stocktake has been published at the UN climate summit, COP28 UAE, on Wednesday morning. While the draft text does not contain the words “phase out”, it includes reference to transitioning away from all fossil fuels to enable the world to reach net zero by 2050.
The text published by the UN’s climate body calls on parties to accelerate and substantially reduce non-carbon dioxide emissions worldwide with a focus on reducing methane emissions by 2030. “We all want to get the most ambitious outcome possible,” Majid Al Suwaidi, COP28 Director-General, said on Tuesday.
The text, published early Wednesday, does not specifically refer to oil, but mentions the need to ‘phase-down’ coal. It says that it recognises the need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5C pathways and calls on Parties to contribute to global efforts.
Among those efforts it recognises the need to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and doubling the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by the same date. It also recognises the need to accelerate the phase-down of coal and accelerate towards net zero energy systems, utilising zero or low carbon fuels by mid century.
While the document does not mention oil or combustion engines, it does recognises the need for accelerating the reduction of emissions from road transport on a range of pathways, including through development of infrastructure and rapid deployment of zero and low-emission vehicles. It also recognises the need to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible.
Finance specifics
On the subject of finance, the document said developed countries should continue to take the lead in mobilising climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions, including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries.
Such mobilisation of climate finance should represent a progression beyond previous efforts, the text said. It may provide small comfort to campaigners from developing countries who implored Parties to begin the phase out of fossil fuels and provide vastly improved access to funding for renewables.
The document highlights the persistent gap and challenges in technology development and transfer and the uneven pace of adoption of climate technologies around the world.
It further urges Parties to address these barriers and strengthen cooperative action, including with non-Party stakeholders, particularly with the private sector, to rapidly scale up the deployment of existing technologies, the fostering of innovation and the development and transfer of new technologies.
It also emphasizes the ongoing challenges faced by many developing country Parties in accessing climate finance and encourages further efforts, including by the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism, to simplify access to such finance, in particular for those developing country Parties that have significant capacity constraints, such as the least developed countries and small island developing States.
