Carbon Offsetting: What It Really Means

Carbon offsetting has been an increasingly popular solution to gain a green reputation for companies. It involves the company paying for an environmental initiative somewhere else in the world which reduces the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere before the company conducts activity that releases the same amount of carbon into the atmosphere.

Although this solution seems like a reasonable approach to achieving net-zero, it has its own limitations. First of all, carbon offsetting is essentially encouraging transnational companies to shed the responsibility of reducing carbon emissions in their own activities and is not fostering a change in the fundamental activities that cause these emissions.

More importantly, carbon offsetting has lead to worker abuse in some places. For example, the afforestation initiative in Uganda used by many companies as their carbon offsetting strategy has been exposed to be abusing its workers and not treating them ethically.

Although carbon offsetting could be a short term strategy to achieving net zero, humans are still going to need more long term and sustainable solutions that actually involve changing the human activities which cause emissions in the first place.