How Companies Like Shell and Delta Use Carbon Offsets to Pollute More
Junk offsets, weird in-flight napkins, and the lies behind many corporate net-zero plans
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In 2019, Shell announced a new campaign in Europe. For just one cent per liter, customers could offset the emissions from their fuel. According to the company’s billboards and other ads, it was now possible to “drive carbon neutral.”
There was just one small problem with this campaign: That extra cent that Shell charged their customers didn’t actually do anything to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
One of the offset projects Shell featured prominently in their campaign was Cordillera Azul in Peru. According to the company’s marketing materials, the area’s forests would be logged if it weren’t for Shell’s support. And that claim was the basis of the entire “drive carbon neutral” concept.
Shell’s gasoline would eventually end up as CO2 in the atmosphere, sure. But it would be offset or compensated for by a reduction in emissions from deforestation.
To show customers what an impact they were making they even made a virtual reality video where people could tour the forest they were helping protect. I know this because I spent $10 to buy some goofy cardboard VR goggles to see it for myself.
But what Shell fails to mention is the fact that this forest was already a national park protected by Peru’s government. And there hadn't been any illegal logging for years before the offset project got started.
As Unearthed reported, the organization behind the offset project wrote that “no illegal logging activities have been observed by park guards in or immediately around the project area since 2006”.
That means the project failed the most important measure of a carbon offsets value: additionality. The offsets didn’t actually do anything to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere.
This project in Peru wasn’t a rare outlier either. When journalists at Unearthed looked into Shell’s campaign they found two more examples of projects that provided no additionality – one in Scotland and one in Indonesia.
Many companies plan to use offsets to reach net-zero
In the last few years, many of the world’s largest corporations, including Shell, have committed to net-zero emissions by 2050. At first glance these announcements seem like great news — evidence that large corporations are finally taking climate change seriously.
But dig into these companies' plans to get to zero emissions, and you’ll notice something alarming. Virtually all of them are planning to use huge amounts of carbon offsets to get there.
Companies like Shell say they plan to “avoid, reduce, then mitigate” their emissions. In other words, they’ll use offsets only as a last resort for the emissions they can’t cut. But based on Shell’s recent actions this clearly isn’t true.
At the same time they were running their “drive carbon neutral” campaign Shell was giving $10 million per year to the American Petroleum Institute, one of the biggest anti-electric vehicle lobbying groups. Earlier this year, Shell announced they would slow their investments in renewable energy and invest in producing more natural gas.
While Shell’s actions are one of the most egregious examples of greenwashing, they are far from the only offender.
Delta’s weird napkins and net-zero claims
In 2020, Delta Air Lines announced it would go net-zero by 2050. With all the talk about how bad flying is for the environment, Delta wanted people to think their flights were different—a guilt-free way to see the world.
One of the places they advertised their net-zero claim was on their in-flight napkins. (Strangely, these napkins are for sale on eBay).
But the claims on the napkin and some of the company’s other marketing materials are a bit confusing. On the napkin, Delta said it has been carbon neutral since March 2020. But in their 2021 annual ESG report the company says they aim to be net-zero by 2050. (Both can’t be true).
But this is to be expected since weird napkins are sort of Delta’s thing. In 2019, Delta gave passengers on their flights napkins that encouraged them to write down their phone numbers and pass them on to their "plane crush."
And just in case you think I’m cherry picking, here’s another Delta napkin that reads somewhat ominously “No one will miss you.”
And here’s another weird one that is easy to misread.
But who cares if Delta has some weird napkins. The bigger problem is that the entire premise of Delta’s net-zero claim is based on a lie.
In 2021, Delta emitted 26 million tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. According to their own accounting, they spent $65 million to buy offsets to wipe out those emissions. This made Delta the second largest buyer of offsets that year, just ahead of Shell.
One of the offset projects that Delta supported was the Los Cocos II wind farm in the Dominican Republic.
The idea of a renewable energy offset like this, is that by supporting a wind farm, Delta could help cut emissions from a fossil fuel power plant nearby. So while a flight pumps a bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere, their support for the project offsets that pollution.
But when journalists at Bloomberg looked into the Los Cocos project, they discovered that the wind farm “almost certainly didn’t need additional support.” There was no additionality. While Delta put all that CO2 into the atmosphere, the Los Cocos project didn’t do anything to offset it.
This is a common pattern in the offset market.
In 2021, General Electric bought about 1.5 million offsets, half of which came from a wind farm in China. But the same investigation by Bloomberg found that the wind farm didn’t need any financial support. It was going to be built regardless.
Recently researchers at the London School of Economics looked at about 500 wind projects in India, one of the biggest offset markets in the world. They concluded that 52% of the projects would have been built with or without the offsets.
The researchers also found that if the polluters that bought those offsets used them to justify more pollution, then they would have added 28 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. To put that in perspective, that’s like running a coal power plant for 5 years.
In 2021, 40% of all offsets were renewable energy offsets like the ones researchers studied in India. Companies like Volkswagen, BP, Boeing, and many of the world’s largest companies used them to claim emissions reductions.
When companies like Delta or Shell are criticized for using bad offsets they typically defend themselves by saying their offsets were verified by independent third parties. But problems in the offset market run deep. Many of the largest third party verifiers are vastly overestimating the benefits of carbon offsets.
Recently a group of journalists and academics investigated Verra, the largest offset certifier in the world. They found that 90% of the offsets that Verra certified provided no benefit at all.
Verra disputes this finding and said the study’s methodology was flawed.
“The offset market is broken”
Many advocates for offsets say that the market can be better regulated and these problems can be fixed. But one frustrating truth of the climate crisis is that time isn’t on our side.
Barbara Haya, the director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, is one of the leading experts on the offset market. Earlier this year she told The Guardian, “One strategy to improve the market is to show what the problems are and really force the registries to tighten up their rules so that the market could be trusted.”
“But I’m starting to give up on that. I started studying carbon offsets 20 years ago studying problems with protocols and programs. Here I am, 20 years later having the same conversation. We need an alternative process. The offset market is broken.”
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