What are Carbon Offsets?
Offsets are essentially a loophole that industries can use to avoid reducing their own emissions by paying someone else, somewhere else, to supposedly reduce their emissions instead. Offsets do not reduce emissions but at best keep emissions the same, just shifting them from one place to another.
Under both the House and Senate bill, 2 billion tons of offsets are provided, the majority from forestry and agriculture. (Note also that, while under ACESA, the capture of landfill gases was mandated, under the Senate version of the bill, landfill gases would be made available as offsets instead.)
Forestry and agriculture, even though they are very major sources of greenhouse gas pollution, are not capped under the cap and trade system, because their emissions are extremely hard to quantify. Instead they are granted the status of receiving funding as offset providers, despite the very same fact that any carbon “sequestration”, for which agribusinesses will have huge incentives to claim in order to receive offset money, will be equally hard to quantify!
This means that a capped polluter, say a coal burning power plant, could, instead of reducing emissions, actually increase emissions by paying a farmer or forester to reduce his emissions instead by planting trees to sequester carbon, or changing the way he farms in some manner that will supposedly lessen emissions. Unfortunately, trees, soils, and agricultural lands and practices are not very reliable or measurable as carbon storage devices (which is why their use was limited within the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism). Planting trees as offsets, often involves installing industrial monocultures. Such tree plantations are more akin to cornfields than forests, sequester only a small fraction of the carbon that natural (and especially old growth) forests they displaced hold, and provide no habitat for biodiversity. “Sustainable forestry management” is very often a misnomer that allows clear-cutting of forests and the replacement of natural forests with tree plantations. Besides, trees may burn, or die due to disease or impacts of warming and thereby release all that stored carbon unexpectedly. All of these uncertainties lead some to refer to offsets as an imaginary commodity created by deducting “what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.”
Farming practices such as “no till” are similarly problematic. No-till is considered an improvement on highly unsustainable practices used for industrial farming of soya and corn, using herbicide tolerant GMO crops. Where no-till is practiced, often increasing doses of herbicides are used to deal with the heightened pest/weed problem…hardly an improvement worthy of offsetting fossil fuel emissions, particularly since these chemicals, along with petro-chemical fertilizers, are destructive to soil microbes, insects and nematodes, (essential to the health of soil and plant root systems), and to maintaining the carbon content in soil organic matter. Industrial farming practices have already resulted in the release of devastating quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, while degrading soil health, depth and nutrient content worldwide (see resources below). These practices must not receive support for nominally “less destructive” practices. Rather, destructive farming practices must be halted altogether and replaced with methods that sustain soil, waterways and biodiversity and provide healthy food for local populations!
Using soils, forests and fields as offsets is also problematic because it equates fossil carbon (carbon mined and brought out from the earth where it was safely stored apart from the biosphere/atmosphere) with biological carbon (carbon circulating relatively rapidly between plants, animals, oceans, soils and…the atmosphere). But clearly the biosphere and atmosphere cannot handle addition of any more fossil carbon. Mining and burning of fossil carbon must be halted, and cannot be offset in the biosphere.
Internationally, via the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, offsets have largely gone to supporting large hydro-electric projects, and the destruction of ozone depleting hydrofluorocarbons (HFC). Large hydroelectric projects, involving the damming of major rivers, result in very large areas being submerged, massive emissions of methane (a greenhouse gas 25x more potent than CO2) from subsequent decay of submerged vegetation, and the displacement of large numbers of people. Worse yet, studies indicate that most of those granted offset funding, were already underway or even completed prior to receiving offset credits, hence any emissions reductions were not “additional” to what would have occurred without funding.
HFC destruction, supported by offset funding, has become a very lucrative business. This created a perverse incentive to manufacture MORE of this dangerous gas in order to ensure a supply is on hand to receive offset credits for its’ destruction. Hardly a solution to climate change.
