Carbon offsets - karma or indulgence?
Carbon offsets are a bit of a joke to most people who are involved in environmental organization and activism. They tend to be lumped into the same category as medieval Catholic indulgences - “buy this special ticket to wipe away your environmental sins” - and are widely regarded as ineffective virtue-signalling. Especially considering the news about how carbon offset money goes to planting monocultures, or non-native trees, or to nothing at all and instead is just swallowed up by human greed. Or something. Yet another in the long list of greenwashing scams that disaster capitalists have cooked up to make a buck off of society’s collective doom. Companies can purchase carbon offsets, then turn around and wave them in front of investors/shareholders/clients/customers as proof that they are, in fact, “green”, and then go back to business as usual, producing the same (or even more) amount of emissions as they did before.
Yet, carbon offsets were set up initially with the best of intentions. And it is still possible, today, to purchase carbon offsets that do actually contribute to combating climate change, along with supporting Indigenous sovereignty and encouraging biodiversity. All it takes is a bit of discernment.
I’m gonna pause here to say that it shouldn’t take a bit of discernment. There absolutely should not be any carbon offsets that aren’t doing the utmost good with your hard-earned cash. But that is the reality of the dystopia that we live in, and it makes me sad and angry, because it doesn’t have to be this way. It doesn’t have to be this hard, but it is, and that’s awful. And thus the need for me to write this article and get this off my chest. Maybe I am too hopeful. Or maybe this is a situation that calls for hope, specifically, as the best way to beat back my cynical doomerism on the topic.
So, the magical carbon offsets that are meant to do all sorts of good things and leave you with fuzzy feelings and the satisfaction that your carbon footprint has been reduced (or at least mitigated for now): the Great Bear Forest Carbon Project, managed by the Coastal First Nations. Despite my sarcasm leading into this paragraph, I do seriously consider this to be one of the best if not the premier example of how to do a carbon offset program correctly.
You can go here or here to read more about the program, but in a nutshell, logging in the Great Bear Rainforest has been slowed significantly and an Indigenous Guardian Watchmen program (similar to forest ranger) set up and it is funded wholly through a carbon offset program managed by the Coastal First Nations, an alliance of nine coastal BC First Nation groups.
The territory is unceded and the Great Bear Rainforest is acknowledged as one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet, but the condition for Indigenous control over their own lands and the conservation of a significant old-growth forest is the funding from the carbon offsets that they sell.
This program, by the way, is a trial run that the Canadian government agreed to in hopes that, if it is successful, it could be implemented elsewhere. But it’s not working very well, because the skepticism for carbon offsets is so high that even this project isn’t being funded to the point of sustainability. Representatives of the project are pretty confident that its values and moral rightness will speak for itself and so the project will not fail, but we live in an age of what Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen call “wiindigo infrastructure” - where the very infrastructure we rely on to survive is at the same time sucking the life from our land… which in turn affects our own survival. The infrastructure required for conservation and Indigenous rights is the faulty and sus program of carbon offsets. No wonder projects like this get lost in the shuffle.
Purchasing carbon offsets for some is an exercise in increasing their good karma. For others, it’s just the price of participating in our fossil-fueled society. For others, it’s a scam perpetuated by Big Business and unethical entrepreneurs looking to prey on ecologically-minded folk.
But I think that, for solarpunks at least, carbon offsets should be seen neither as wholly good, nor wholly bad. The ability to hold two conflicting concepts in one’s mind is extremely necessary in this case, in order to walk the tension that is life in late capitalism: understanding that the program can be used for good or for evil and is currently being used for both, necessitating a deeper, more thorough look through what exactly constitutes a particular carbon offset program.
Having the financial capital to be able to purchase carbon offsets, by the way, is a privilege. The cost of living is soaring, and only set to get higher, as the chickens of the 19th century’s imperialism and mid-late 20th century’s offshoring to purchase products at a fraction of their actual cost come home to roost. Downloading the responsibility of mitigating one’s “carbon footprint” on to individuals is absolutely morally bankrupt and a sick consequence of fossil fuel companies’ greedy disinformation campaigns (exacerbated by the neoliberal bootheel we’re being ground down under today) … but it is also the reality of the world the way that it is. Some of us were born into it and know nothing else, and this is the language we must speak to be understood.
And so, I would love it if individuals take this knowledge of The Great Bear Forest Carbon Program back to the companies they work for, so that their organization can be empowered to do right by the planet and their people in offsetting their business’ emissions.
I would be equally pleased if individuals who have the financial capacity to do so offset the emissions generated by their lifestyle (perhaps they travel quite a bit for business, or eat a lot of meat), and encouraged their financially well-off friends and family members to do so as well.
If readers of this article aren’t in a financial position to support TGBFCP (lol) and have met a dead-end when it comes to communicating with corporate about buying in to the program, but find it a worthy cause, I’d encourage those folks to pick one of the brands that they love, and email them with a polite suggestion. An avalanche is composed of millions of individual snowflakes, as the saying goes. We might live within the constraints of a terrible dystopian system built on colonial violence but that doesn’t mean we can’t subvert it in even small ways.
Here are a few places to go to read more, purchase carbon offsets, and links to send about this program:
For UK folk, iOffset is a good place to start
In North America, Ostrom Climate or Carbonzero.ca is where you’ll want to go
What’s your opinion of carbon offsets? Have you ever purchased them? Let me know in the comments.