We spoke to the experts:
There was a time when climate change seemed like one piece on the checkerboard of world problems, a piece perhaps sandwiched between war in a remote country and the fact that the bees were dying, which you knew you were supposed to be upset about even if you weren't sure exactly why.
Not long after, these millennial-friendly labels known for their sustainability-centric marketing were joined by their luxury peers: Gabriela Hearst, whose $6,000 handbags have become a fixture in the wardrobe of Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, claimed to host the first ever carbon-neutral runway show at New York Fashion Week. Gucci declared its operations — including its extensive global supply chain and its latest fashion show — 100% carbon neutral earlier this month.
There are a few key critiques that offsetting skeptics make: that it gives corporations an excuse not to shrink their direct emissions, that the offsetting market is historically unreliable, and that accounting for offsets is often inaccurate. "But what happened was that as the standards got stronger," he continues, "and as brands and companies became more aware of the issues and more adept at figuring out which projects worked and doing due diligence, those [fraudulent] companies began to disappear."
Leakage is a third concern. If you paid to protect trees in land plot A, and the landowner took your money to protect those trees but then just cut down trees in adjacent plot B, that would be considered leakage. You didn't prevent the carbon-sucking trees from being cut down, you just caused the site of the chopping to change. On top of that, there's the concern of whether or not the offset project has the potential to harm communities that might live nearby.
"Right now forests are seen as cheap credits, the low-hanging fruit," she explains on the phone. "But if we do it properly, they actually would cost a lot more." Aldyen Donnelly is a former consultant who's been involved in carbon trading since the early '90s. By 2003, she was the largest private speculative buyer of offset credit in the world — surpassed only by organizations like the World Bank, she says. In short, she knows the market inside and out. While she acknowledges many of the other pitfalls listed here, one of the biggest in her view stems from a simple math problem.
What that means for brands is that when they think they've purchased 500 tons worth of carbon offsets across international borders, there's really only a net gain of about 250 tons at the most — and that's if they've managed to avoid all the other pitfalls listed above. It's such a silly math mistake that it's hard to believe it's happening in something as large as the multibillion-dollar offset industry.
"You can always argue that it's better not to emit in the first place, and that's what we try to convince our clients to do," says Arnaud Brohe, CEO of offset provider CO2 Logic. "But we believe that if you do emit, it's also better to clean up after your mess." And while some might claim that offsets let brands pay to pollute, the money they're handing over can make a real difference for farmers and other private landowners, who often need financial support to become more climate-friendly operations. Regenerative agriculture practices, for example, have incredible potential to draw carbon out of the atmosphere, but there can be financial barriers for farmers who want to begin implementing them.
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