We’ve likely all used carbon offsets in one form or another.
Many people offset their air travel which is usually a simple process at the airline checkout page.
This deceptively simple act taps into a basic human need for quick results and instant feedback.
We all know (or darn well should) that greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the earth’s atmosphere are driving dangerous changes to our climate and we have to lower emissions (GHG reduction/avoidance) and remove much of what we’ve already released (GHG removal).
Carbon offsets are often promoted as the way to achieve these outcomes — many lives literally depend on us achieving them. However, offsets are not always the right tool for the job:
Offsetting is essentially handing the problem to someone else to fix. No doubt that offsets are a hugely important transition tool to decarbonizing our economy but the complete solution is to remove the need for offsets (except in very limited circumstances).
The real work is changing how we do what we do so there are no GHG emissions attributable to that activity. To do that completely, we need to look at all three scopes of our emissions profile:
Most organizations will find that Scope 3 is where all the action is, and where efforts to directly reduce GHG emission need to focus.
We need to look past the offset to the underlying activity that generated it. One tonne of carbon was removed or not emitted — definitely a good thing. Instead of letting that activity be claimed by someone else to balance out their own emitting, it’s often better for it to be inset — recognized by a direct supply chain collaborator so that we can all know that the products and services we consume are natively zero-carbon.
Offsets are a vital tool in transitioning to a zero-carbon economy — but they need to used correctly.
We all first need to do the hard work of lowering the emissions profile of our own activity and selecting products and services that achieve net-zero the same way.
Keep the offsets for the hard-to-crack cases where you can’t find a low- or zero-carbon alternative.
This post was created with Typeshare