Carbon offsets can so easily go up in smoke
Coldplay tree planting among the schemes that failed
ENVIRONMENTAL groups are calling it the Greta Thunberg effect, after the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist.
It’s the huge rise in companies and individuals buying carbon offsets to supposedly balance their pollution by investing in projects such as forest planting and protection schemes in the Third World.
One company that supplies offsetting projects says it has witnessed a 1,000% increase in its business during the past 18 months.
But offsetting has been riddled with scams and failures.
One high-profile disaster was the Coldplay plan to plant 10,000 mango trees in India to offset the carbon produced by jetting around the world while promoting their second album.
Poor farmers were not paid to look after the trees, many of which died from drought or were burnt – releasing the very carbon into the atmosphere that they were supposed to store.
The Australian airline Qantas is currently offering its passengers the chance to offset their flight carbon emissions by investing in a scheme to protect forests in a part of Papua New Guinea called April Salumei.
I first came across this area when I exposed UK company World Futures Limited, which used cold callers to con £2.5million from the public by flogging investments that proved worthless. The company was shut down in the High Court in the public interest.
Qantas, which was unconnected to the World Futures scandal, insists that its offsets in April Salumei are sound. “100% of your contribution goes towards verified carbon offset projects that meet strict international standards, including the Verified Carbon Standard and the Gold Standard,” it says.
The Verified Carbon Standard is managed by an organisation called Verra, which maintains: “We can accurately quantify benefits.”
Yet it has told me that April Salumei had not been verified since 2013, it has no idea what’s happened to public money paid to support it, and the Papua New Guinea government says it was discontinued due to land ownership disputes. The developer of the scheme, an Australian called Stephen Hooper of Rainforest Project Management, failed to reply when I got in touch. In another messy example, Virgin Airline passengers used to be able to buy carbon offsets in a project in Oddar Meanchey in Cambodia. That was until last year, when the airline withdrew because, far from being protected, much of the forest was being destroyed.
Virgin said it had supported the project at a time when it conformed to Verified Carbon Standards, but “things can change in the years between verifications”.
Last month British Airways boasted of a commitment to “net zero carbon emissions by 2050”. The key word is “net”. It will not achieve zero carbon emissions, it will merely try to balance the carbon that it pumps out with projects to soak it up.
The airline industry is pinning its hopes on something called Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, or CORSIA.
One expert who has long studied reduced emissions schemes is Chris Lang of the website REDD-monitor.org, and he’s scathing about CORSIA.
“The reason that the aviation and other large polluting industries like offsets is that they let them appear to be addressing climate change while at the same time continuing to burn fossil fuels,” he said.
“The one guaranteed thing that happens under carbon offsetting is that the carbon emissions still take place, because the flights still happen, meanwhile the offsetting may not succeed.”
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Firms like offsetting as they can keep on burning fossil fuels