In Professor Jessica F. Green's article The False Promise of Carbon Offsets in Foreign Affairs she discusses the ineffectiveness of carbon offsets and posits that phasing them out is the one step all countries can take to decarbonize their economies. "Offsets suffer from various problems. Their highly technical nature makes them prone to gaming and accounting tricks that often inflate the estimated emission reductions. If all offsets worked on a scale of thousands of years, they could effectively lower global concentrations of greenhouse gases. But virtually all offsets sold today are temporary, generally working on a scale of decades or a century. These only delay emissions, rather than abating them entirely. Politically, offsets are a false solution."
The false promise of carbon offsets
November 21, 2023 by
Kiran Champatsingh