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Plant A Tree, Offset Your Carbon, It's Greenwashing All The Way Down

Heidi Blake is a writer at the New Yorker, author of two books, and recently wrote the most amazing magazine piece about the carbon offsetting market and some of the greenwashing schemes at its core. 

In this podcast we cover top to bottom Heidi’s story in the New Yorker, details about the characters involved, greenwashing, offshore finance, south pole, and the huge potential but also gaping flaws of carbon offsetting. 

#156 of ‘The Curious Worldview Podcast’ with Heidi Blake.

Forward this email or share this podcast episode with your mate who’s bought enough chocolate bars to plant a forest in the Amazon.

Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
Heidi, what is the business of carbon offsetting?

Heidi
So carbon offsetting rests on this idea that the carbon that we, as a species, release into the atmosphere can be turned into a kind of fungible commodity. So something equivalent to say coffee or cotton. And that it can be traded, right? So that if you emit some carbon by driving around in your great big SUV, you can pay me to emit less carbon by maybe not driving my car around, and that we kind of cancel the problem out by doing that.

And at a global scale, that notion was enshrined into international law when the Kyoto Protocol was signed back in 1997. It wasn't ratified until 2005. But under that global agreement, rich nations agreed to try and stay within emissions limits. And they were allowed to try to stay within those caps by paying projects in poorer countries to try to reduce emissions. So by doing things like capturing methane or paying for chemical plants to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas they emitted. Global countries could justify not having actually managed to reduce their own emissions output by paying for those projects in the developing world. And that's really how the notion of a trade in carbon was born.

Ryan
But then where do the incentives misalign that make room for things like greenwashing?

Heidi
Well, the kind of trajectory of the carbon market is that the system that was operated by the UN pretty much collapsed in 2012, which was the end of the first commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol. And at that point, most countries had missed their targets. Major players refused to sign up to new ones. And there'd been a series of scandals which had really dented investor confidence in carbon offsetting. And so the UN system pretty much collapsed and fell away. And after that, the private sector kind of stepped in and built its own system of carbon offsetting. And that is what's known as the voluntary carbon market. And this is where things get really difficult and problematic because the voluntary carbon market exists to sell carbon offsets to brands that want to reduce their emissions for reasons of ethics or often more likely public relations.

And so you have companies like say Porsche telling their customers you can drive your Cayenne, you know, emissions free, if you just pay $67, we can wipe away all of the tons of carbon that you emitted into the atmosphere and you don't have to feel any guilt about what you did. And it's a way for brands to convince consumers that they can free themselves of any kind of environmental or climate guilt and continue consuming and continue using products that are very carbon intensive. By those brands investing relatively small amounts of money in carbon offsetting projects, often in impoverished countries.

And where that gets particularly problematic is with schemes based around forest carbon. So where you're often taking a patch of forest, which may or may not have been in danger in the first place of being cut down, and saying we're going to justify continued pollution by major companies in the Western world on the basis that this forest is not being cut down over here in Zimbabwe, which is the project that I looked particularly closely into in the piece that I wrote for The New Yorker.

And that is just fraught with difficulty because it's incredibly hard to prove that you actually prevented any carbon from being released into the atmosphere by looking after trees.

Ryan
Is it all a problem of auditing or is it just despite how good your auditors might be? It's almost impossible to calculate how much carbon you have saved.

Heidi
Well, it's a bit of both. So some of it is just incredibly difficult to do this kind of carbon accounting, even with the best will in the world. And that's because in order to prove that you prevented emissions by protecting a forest, you have to be able to prove that if you hadn't taken the steps you took to protect those trees, that they would otherwise have been cut down. And that's a counterfactual scenario. You're proving that something didn't happen that would otherwise have happened.

That's not something that's ever possible to prove with any certainty. How can you know? Like that's not possible. That's not something that's possible to prove with any certainty. How can you possibly know what would have happened in some hypothetical future scenario if you hadn't done the things that you did? Um, then there are all kinds of other problems, one of which is the problem of permanence. So greenhouse gases, uh, once emitted tend to linger in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

……. continue the conversation with the podcast here.