Climate change’s consequences had not been fully understood until a few decades ago and there have also been misleading ideas in this space. Yet this recent enlightenment has benefitted from the age of new ideas and innovations in science. One such innovation is carbon offsets. A carbon offset is an activity in which an individual or company invests in projects that protect the environment, reduce carbon emissions, protect natural habitats etc to make up for carbon emissions elsewhere. This is done by purchasing carbon credits. Basically you purchase carbon credits from a carbon credit seller and they will use that money to fund some conservation project. While this idea may look harmless, as soon as you look at the big picture you will realize that in general these carbon credit sellers do not actually help in reversing climate change.
Firstly, many of these carbon credit sellers use a baseline which depends on the idea that if it weren’t for their projects the said conservation areas would be cleared and destroyed. However many of these “protected” areas have and are protected by governments or NGOs.
Furthermore, many of these carbon offset projects actually harm local and indigenous populations by forcefully evicting them from their land and other methods. This is especially frustrating considering that these people conserve 80% of earth’s biodiversity.
Moreover, many major corporations (particularly oil companies) use solely carbon offsets to protect themselves from public backlash against their unethical environmental practices. This can mislead consumers and the general public to thinking the company is environmentally responsible.
While carbon offsets are misleading and ineffective this is by no means an excuse to ignore the many other useful innovations in climate change reversal. In fact we should do the opposite and invest in research and education about these ideas. As climate change worsens year by year it is now more important than ever to distinguish bad ideas like carbon offsets from the good ones.
Carbon Offsets
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