Public support is building
for big, bold action
on climate
and companies are matching that enthusiasm
with big bold promises
to reduce their carbon emissions to zero.
Well, not exactly zero, net zero.
The airline industry announced a goal
of net zero airline emissions by 2050.
Pepsi pledges to be net zero by 2040.
Amazon is looking to achieve net zero carbon by 2040.
Now, Shell wants to be net zero by 2050.
Net zero is a pledge that you won't increase the amount
of carbon in the atmosphere.
You can do that by decreasing your carbon emissions
to zero or keep emitting carbon,
but cancel out those emissions by purchasing carbon offsets.
The idea of a carbon offset is that
for every ton of carbon you put into the atmosphere,
you offset that
by taking a ton of carbon out.
So, instead of decarbonizing their whole business,
companies can keep polluting and buy offsets.
They can keep drinking, throw their credit card
on the bar and say, put it on my tab.
Dozens of companies now sell offsets, funding thousands
of projects around the world.
They do things like restore forests
or replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.
And as more companies and countries make net zero pledges,
the demand for these offsets is booming.
Transactions
on the global carbon markets totaled 850 billion dollars
in 2021, which all raises a pretty important question.
Do these things actually work?
In theory, offsets allow money to flow
wherever it's cheapest and easiest
to reduce emissions.
That should lower global emissions faster
than if everyone focused only on lowering their own.
And for operations that have no affordable alternative
to burning fossil fuel right now,
offsets are better than nothing.
But how offset projects work on the ground
often doesn't match the theory.
So here's an example.
Some offsets plant trees, which absorb carbon.
Green Trees is the largest developer
of these projects in North America
and several large corporations have bought their offsets
to reach net zero.
But a Bloomberg investigation found
that Green Trees often takes credit
for planting trees that were already there.
They're doing the same thing as those guys who pose
in front of somebody else's Lambo on their Tinder profile,
but for trees, which is wild.
Now, the vast majority
of carbon offsets don't actually claim
to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
They take the form of avoided emissions.
Essentially, these offsets pay people
to protect trees from being cut down.
But for this to work,
those trees need to be a hundred percent doomed,
and a lot of time they aren't.
The Nature Conservancy,
the world's largest environmental group,
sells avoided emissions offsets.
But Bloomberg reporters found that many
of the forests that they claim to preserve
are in no danger of being cut down.
They're not even breaking a sweat.
The problem here is
that carbon offsets are essentially IOUs to the atmosphere,
but the atmosphere has no power
to collect those IOUs.
There's no atmosphere enforcement agency.
There are carbon offset registries,
which validate carbon savings,
but those aren't accountable to anyone.
So there's a huge incentive for landowners
to do as little as possible to keep
that sweet offset cash rolling in.
And there's a huge incentive
for companies to use cheap dubious offsets
to give the appearance
of cutting emissions
and avoid the difficult work of actually cutting them.
Now, there are a few examples of effective offsets,
like ones that take carbon directly out of the air,
which can be accurately measured,
but far, far more commonly,
the carbon offset market is used
as a reputation laundromat
and that can make climate change even worse,
by giving a false impression of progress
while robbing us of time.
And when it comes to the climate emergency,
time is a precious resource that we can't afford to lose.
So can the carbon offset market clean up its act
and live up to its promises?
Our teams went to investigate.
Take a look.