It is no longer enough to leave fossil fuels in the ground and decarbonise our economies. We’ve left it too late. We also need extract massive amounts of historic carbon from the atmosphere; otherwise we have no hope of keeping global temperature rise at 1.5°c.
By far the most effective means are ‘nature-based solutions’ such as carbon sequestration in vegetation and soils: restoring living systems, such as forests, salt marshes, peat bogs and the sea floor, will extract carbon dioxide and lock it up, mostly in trees or waterlogged soil and mud.
There are only two legitimate uses of nature-based solutions: removing historic carbon from the air and offsetting the unavoidable emissions once we have decarbonised the rest of the economy. Instead, they are being widely used as an excuse to do nothing, an alternative for effective action.
An increasing number of organisations are offering voluntary carbon offsetting schemes as a means of compensating for emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), mostly from transport, stating this could help to stabilise or reduce emissions. The rich and famous justify using their private jets by offsetting the emissions of the trip by planting trees, thus saving their conscience.
But carbon offsetting and nature offsetting are worsening both climate and nature emergencies. They can’t be made to work at the scale needed and trying to do so is a dangerous distraction from the real job at hand: cutting carbon emissions and restoring nature.
Warnings that carbon offsetting should not be used as a substitute for decarbonising economic life went unheeded. So now something that should be a force for good has turned into a corporate gold rush – trading in carbon credits. A carbon credit represents one tonne of GHGs deemed to have been avoided or removed from the atmosphere and the market for these credits has boomed.
Rather than leaving fossil fuels in the ground, oil and gas firms continue to prospect for new reserves while claiming that the credits they buy have turned them ‘carbon neutral’. Shell’s Drive Carbon Neutral scheme states that, by buying fuel on its loyalty card, the ‘unavoidable’ emissions from their fleets of vehicles can be offset “through Shell’s global portfolio of nature-based solutions projects”. Sadly, Shell’s pilot carbon capture plant recently found it produced more emissions than it captured!
There is simply not enough land on Earth to soak up corporate GHGs through carbon offset or carbon credits. Oxfam estimates that the land required to meet carbon removal plans by businesses could amount to more than the entire area of farmland on the planet!
Carbon offsetting is resulting in extremely stable banks of carbon – fossil fuels buried below geological strata – being swapped for less secure stores: new trees and habitats on the Earth’s surface. Last year, corporate offset forests were incinerated by the wildfires raging across North America.
While there are international standards for how carbon should be counted, there is no accounting for the moral hazard of carbon offsetting: the false assurance that persuades us we need not change the way we live. There is no accounting for the way companies use these projects to justify business as usual. There is no accounting for how they use this greenwashing to persuade governments not to regulate them. Nature-based solutions should help us to avoid systemic environmental collapse. Instead they are being used to help accelerate it.
We need to stop carbon offsets and carbon credits. We have to make sure fossil fuels are kept in the ground. The UK government, however, has approved a new oil field in the North Sea just months after the COP26 Conference where they were warned about the effect it would have on climate change.
Fossil fuel companies are lining up to start over 30 new coal, oil and gas extraction projects in the UK. We must speak up now, or the government will let them go ahead.
For more information about Sherwood Forest Friends of the Earth, visit Sherwood Forest FoE on Facebook or email sffofe@btinternet.com.
Pauline Meechan
Sherwood Forest Friends of the Earth