Carbon Offsetting & Capture: The Frontline of Greenwashing
The Climate Crisis isn’t new; we’ve known about its existence since the 1960s, fossil fuel companies have been actively supressing it and trying to delay action on it since the 1970s, and we have known since this time that there is only one solution: reduce consumption in order to reduce emissions.
Yet, instead of actually reducing our emissions – the only action that will avert the sixth mass extinction on this planet – the idea of being able to ‘offset’ emissions has taken hold as an apparent solution.
Almost every major corporation is now braying to its customers about ‘offsetting’ the emissions of their products by planting trees or investing in carbon capture services, but in reality this is just another delaying tactic that will have little impact on preserving life on this planet.
Today, we show the lack of viability in carbon offsetting and carbon capture schemes, and why you should question those companies that profit from you buying into these ideas.
Where will you plant all the trees?
The most common form of ‘carbon offsetting’ is when companies promise to plant an amount of trees equivalent to the emissions that their product creates – this is typical in everything from airlines to consumer goods.
You may think this is a good thing, but as we’ve highlighted before, this achieves very little in reality, as many companies lie about the number of trees they plant, and fail to tell you that it’ll take between 15-35 yeas for the tree to mature and actually capture as much CO2 as the carbon offsetting scheme claims – time that we don’t have to waste in the face of the Climate Emergency.
The prevalence of this greenwashing approach hides how truly ineffectual it is, and the scale of the Climate Crisis we face.
In reality, there just isn’t enough land on Earth to plant enough trees to soak up all CO2 that major emitters produce, let alone the rest of us.
A 2021 report from Oxfam found that we would need 1.6bn hectares – equivalent to five times the size of India, or more than all the farmland on the planet combined – of new forests to meet existing carbon offsetting pledges.
We would need an area the size of Brazil and Australia combined covered in nothing but forests if we wanted were to reach net-zero emissions pledges. Credit: Oxfam and The Guardian
The fossil fuel giant Shell alone would need an area roughly the size of Italy to offset just 35% of its emissions by 2050. This is based on their current emissions which, like all fossil fuel companies, they actually plan to increase rather than reduce.
Even the average person cannot plant their way out of the Climate Crisis. The typical American would need to plant 640 mature trees per year to offset their high-consumption, high-emission lifestyle.
Even if we did have enough space on this planet to offset all our current emissions, without increasing them further, the rapid rate of deforestation to meet our demand for consumption would undo these gains.
Charles Harvey, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, said: “It’s almost silly to think about planting a huge number of new trees when we’re just burning and destroying them everywhere, releasing carbon at rates that are much higher than new growth would take up.”
Furthermore, new trees are vulnerable to the increased extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent and intense as the Climate Crisis worsens. A newly planted forest is useless if it is burned down by a forest fire before it can mature.
Only by reducing emissions can we make actual progress in the face of the Climate Crisis, while also addressing the 7 million premature deaths that occur worldwide each year due to air pollution.
Carbon capture and storage technology is just another delaying tactic - not a solution to the Climate Crisis. Exxon’s own data shows what a tiny impact it has, despite repeatedly extolling its virtues. Credit: ExxonMobil
Carbon Capture
Alongside the idea of carbon offsetting, corporations and governments are increasingly promoting the idea of carbon capture as a solution to the Climate Crisis.
The idea is to either use technology or natural means, such as tree planting, to effectively suck carbon out of the air and store it in the Earth – thereby reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
For more detail, we have a whole article dedicated to the topic here.
However, as we’ve highlighted above we simply cannot count on planting trees as a way to tackle atmospheric emissions, and trees don’t last forever, so we should expect that stored carbon would be released at some point in the future.
Alongside the natural approaches, a great many corporations are touting carbon capture technologies as the silver bullet – especially fossil fuel firms.
Yet, in reality these technologies are just another way of delaying action on actually cutting emissions.
ExxonMobil is a leading proponent of carbon capture technology and has claimed that this new form of greenwashing will be a $4 trillion industry by 2050. Yet, in reality their own figures show that their existing carbon capture and storage projects impact a miniscule percentage of what they actually emit.
The same can be said for Shell, which invested $146 million in carbon capture and storage technologies in 2021 alone, only to find that just 48% of emissions at their exemplar facility were captured – compared to the 90% that was promised, as reported by Global Witness.
If you want to know how seriously Shell is actually taking carbon capture and storage, their investment in 2021 was just 0.2% of their total profits for the year.
They know this doesn’t work, just like the fossil fuel industry knew that reducing emissions was the only viable action on the Climate Crisis in the 1970s. This is just the latest in a long line of lies and misinformation designed to avoid accountability and to continue profiting from making this an unliveable planet.
Don’t buy into delays
The answer to this is not to buy into corporations who are still focused on doing the ‘right’ thing only to maintain their profits. The world we live in, and the consumption levels of modern life, are entirely at odds with maintaining a liveable planet.
Yes, we absolutely do need to increase forest cover and this will help to balance CO2 emissions in the air. But this will mean nothing if we do not stop deforestation and reduce the amount of greenhouse gases that we emit in the first place.
Carbon offsetting is a delaying tactic that corporations – and governments – are using to avoid taking steps that will actually address the Climate Crisis. We cannot allow them to continue this.
What To Read Next
Don’t Put Your Faith In Carbon Capture
Carbon capture promises a solution in the face of the Climate Crisis, but in reality is falls far short of the mark, and is even used to justify new fossil fuel projects
Stop Burning Stuff
With an estimated 1,300 premature deaths in Ireland occurring every year due to the air pollution from burning solid fuels- which also worsen the Climate Crisis - its time to stop lighting our fires
Applegreen-Washing: Separating Action From Marketing Ploys
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