By Jenna Dyer
Warmer weather approaches at last. For many Americans, that means vacations to remote beaches, grand national parks, and the world’s great cultural cities. Today, airline travel is miraculously accessible—but its climatological costs have never been higher.
A single long-haul flight can create more carbon emissions than the average person in some countries does in a year. A short flight from Boston to Washington, D.C., generates more carbon than the average person in 11 countries. Want to escape New York City for Miami? Flying out of JFK will set you back more than the average person in 26 countries. Looking to spend spring in Paris instead of Los Angeles? Be prepared for that flight to create more CO2 than the average individual in 70 countries. When accounting for the 853 million passengers that travel each year, flights make up a significant portion of global carbon emissions.
Awareness about the polluting effects of air travel continues to rise (just ask Taylor Swift), so airlines have sought to deemphasize the fact that the industry is inherently polluting and instead portray themselves as sustainable and eco-friendly. They accomplish this “greenwashing” through carbon offsets.
The idea is that if a company emits CO2, it can be offset by planting or protecting trees, building a wind farm, or financing other carbon-reducing strategies. This approach allows businesses that can’t immediately reduce emissions to balance them by buying emissions reductions somewhere else. In some parts of the world, where there are caps on how much companies can emit, companies can purchase carbon offsets to get back below the cap. Some companies buy offsets voluntarily so they can claim to be “net-zero;” for example, the U.S. airline company Delta, announced plans in 2020 to invest a billion dollars in green initiatives and has spent $137 million so far to offset 27 million megatons of “unavoidable” CO2 emissions, a price that works out to a mere $5.04 a ton.
So, a ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere costs Delta less than a six-piece Chicken McNuggets?
Not exactly. But that’s because carbon offsets are neither regulated nor effective. In 2016, the European Union Commission took a closer look at carbon offset schemes. They discovered that just two percent of them had a high likelihood of guaranteeing that the emission reductions are additional and not overstated—meaning that there is only a two percent chance that the project will actually decrease emissions and those companies offset no carbon. Despite this, credits are still traded in their name, claiming to offset carbon emissions. JPMorgan, Disney, and BlackRock have all proudly proclaimed to fund the preservation of carbon-absorbing forests, equalizing any emissions they may produce. But in each case, those trees were never in danger of being cut down in the first place, which Danny Cullenward, a lecturer at Stanford University and Policy Director at CarbonPlan, equates to engaging in “the business of creating fake carbon offsets.”
This growing skepticism has led to companies starting to feel the heat, too. In May 2023, Delta was hit with a lawsuit claiming that their newly-acquired claims of carbon neutrality were a misrepresentation in order to gain market share and charge unjustly inflated prices. Since the suit was filed, the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley has concluded that REDD+ credits, representing roughly a quarter of globally-issued carbon offsets, are not a reliable tool for offsetting. The study found that developers exploit the system to exaggerate CO2, a risk amplified by the lack of oversight. Simply put, there’s a massive problem with oversight in the carbon credit market. In 2022, the traded value of the worldwide carbon credit market was $978.56 billion. It’s expected to hit $2.68 trillion by 2028.
The carbon offsets market is volatile at best and worthless at worst, but remains a cornerstone of global efforts to reduce climate change. Fortunately, some economists argue that it is still possible to mold it into an effective solution to the climate crisis through a new program of wide-reaching regulations.
In the current absence of regulators, standards are set by monitoring nonprofits that host registries. When a company finds the standards for one credit too stringent, they can shop around for one that is less rigorous. Instances of nonprofit auditors dropping the ball on examining projects run rampant: in one case, an auditor used an unrelated article on water nutrients which served as the basis for assertions of carbon preservation in trees. In another, an auditor gave the green light to a project, giving it a zero fire-risk assessment even though he personally witnessed a fire during a site visit. As a result of no standard regulations, buyers in the market are susceptible to significant losses. Impartial scientific review of projects’ claims of reducing CO2 typically happens after projects are approved and the relevant carbon credits are issued.
Some claim that watchdogs who accredit REDD+ projects safeguard the integrity of projects, therefore there is no need for sweeping regulations. David Antonioli, Chief Executive Officer of the Verified Carbon Standard, argues that buffer pools provide insurance against failures. However, common sense dictates that buffer pools only work if their credits are trustworthy. Because of the vast amount of unverified and even fraudulent credits, the buffer pools are as untrustworthy as the questionable credits they are designed to insure.
As a result, new regulation needs to apply to auditors, holding those who approve carbon offset projects to higher standards. To create actual change, companies need to take real action to reduce their carbon emissions rather than relying on offsetting schemes that do more harm than good. Carbon offsets need to be reviewed and regulated—before it’s too late.
Jenna Dyer is a Master’s of Public Administration Student specializing in Social Impact, Innovation, and Investment with a focus on corporate social responsibility.
