Offsets don’t work. They have become a licence to pollute.
What we actually need is a reduction in carbon emissions, not carbon-emitting industries to greenwash their impact by investing in a solar farm or planting saplings. While it’s nice to know that big polluters are keen to invest in green industry it would be better if they just stopped polluting. You know what’s better than offsets?
Transition to non-carbon emitting solutions.
We are living in unprecedented times.
Climate change according to world experts is now out of control, and with data that shows average world temperatures the hottest on record it’s clear we are moving towards catastrophe.
Climate change doesn’t care about your offsets.
The temperature doesn’t stop rising because a coal company has carbon offsets.
The whole concept of offsetting just seems nuts to me.
It’s like an alcoholic who has a ginger beer once a week thinking that helps them get sober.
You can’t offset alcoholism. You just have to stop.
Capitalism has nurtured emission-addicted climate denying corporations, who come home drunk. Every night. Then they buy us flowers.
It’s like a cigarette company donating to a lung cancer charity every time some poor bastard buys their ciggies.
It’s like setting fire to your suburb but sponsoring the fire service who have to put it out.
It’s like being a paedophile who sponsors a child in Africa through World Vision.
All the good will in the world doesn’t stop the actual harm. It doesn’t assuage your guilt.
Why are we letting perpetrators of our own extinction, the corporations who steal from our children’s future, offset their profits with their fuzzy, feel-good projects?
And why are we making the extractive villains the heroes in the story?
A story earlier this year in the Guardian stated that according to a new investigation, the forest carbon offsets approved by the world’s leading certifier and used by Disney, Shell, Gucci and other big corporations are largely worthless and could make global heating worse.
Verra is the world’s leading carbon standard for the voluntary offset market. The article reported that based on analysis of a significant percentage of the projects, more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits – among the most commonly used by companies – are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.
Sadly, that’s no surprise. I don’t have faith in extractive capital-driven corporations, who use their wealth to run roughshod over government and community, to do anything except refine and update ways to decimate the environment in return for their dirty blood-soaked billions.
Offsetting is what has been used to fool us into allowing coal companies to keep emitting.
They are criminals. The dirty emitters who foul the future.
Offsetting is what allows us to accept forest and old growth trees to be felled.
Don’t worry, the developer is offsetting with some tree plantings.
Here’s an offset idea I quite like. We live in a nation with enormous empty houses worth tens of millions. Maybe we just knock them down. And we can offset them.
With public housing.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
