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Offsetting is not an option if we are serious about addressing the climate crisis. My response to Hartmut Graßl

Posted on 13 May 202229 June 2022

By Chris Lang

In 2021, I wrote an article for Forum Umwelt und Entwicklung, a network of German NGOs working on environment and development. The article is available in English here:

Offsetting is not an option

In short, the article argues that in order to address the climate crisis we have to leave fossil fuels underground. But instead of discussing how to do this, 30 years of climate negotiations at the UN level have created a series of dangerous distractions, in particular relying on carbon offsetting schemes, such as REDD.

The purpose of carbon markets is not to reduce emissions, it is to allow Big Polluters to continue their destruction and extractivism. The oil industry’s claims of “carbon neutral” fossil fuels reveal this purpose clearly. Claims that emissions can be “offset” by buying carbon credits are just greenwash.

The article was reposted by Klimareporter°. Last week, Klimareporter° interviewed physicist and meteorologist, Hartmut Graßl, who is a member of Klimareporter°’s editorial board. Graßl is featured regularly on the Klimareporter° website.

Graßl’s comments

Here’s a translation of the question relating to my article and Graßl’s answer. Unfortunately, it appears that Graßl either didn’t read the article in full, or completely misunderstood it. My response is below.

Klimareporter°: For 30 years, climate policy has been constantly presenting new beacons of hope: CO2 markets, climate compensation, net zero emissions, nature-based solutions. This is just a distraction from real climate protection, says land use expert Chris Lang in a guest article. The only effective thing to do is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Is he right?

Hartmut Graßl: Offsetting is not an option As an agreement binding under international law, the Paris Climate Agreement has two pillars, namely a maximum mean global warming substantially below two degrees and the achievement of greenhouse gas neutrality in the second half of our century. In view of the dominance of carbon dioxide in industrial society, the international community can only achieve both if all still recoverable fossil fuels remain in the earth’s crust – after a short transition period with rapidly decreasing use.

But this also means that these mineral resources will soon be worth nothing, and a completely new energy supply must be built. We must return to a second solar age, after we had said goodbye to the first solar age for a few centuries with fossil fuels. In this respect, the guest author is right. What counts now is equipping countries with the two most important renewable energies, solar and wind.

But what he says about other aspects of the carbon cycle we influence needs to be supplemented. The Paris Agreement calls for greenhouse gas neutrality, so, for example, sinks for carbon – mostly CO2 and methane – must be as large as sources. So if we continue to eat meat and dairy products, we must create sinks.

We also need to stop or compensate for the many other sources of greenhouse gases that are hardly ever discussed. First, there are the CO2 emissions to stop from drained peat soils, currently 55 million tonnes per year in Germany – that’s about seven percent of all emissions.

But methane emissions from former coal mines and old landfills are also part of this, as are nitrous oxide emissions from fields fertilised mainly with artificial nitrogen fertiliser.

The Paris Agreement is not working

In the first two paragraphs, Graßl agrees with the argument that we have to leave fossil fuels in the ground. But three of the points he raises are odd, to say the least:

  • Graßl’s reference to, and apparent defence of, the Paris Agreement is interesting. The reality is that in the seven years since the Paris Agreement emissions from fossil fuels have increased apart from a temporary 5.4% dip in 2020 because of the pandemic. Global fossil CO2 emissions are 3% above 2015 levels:
     
    Offsetting is not an option
  • Graßl describes the Paris Agreement as “binding under international law”. That’s a bit of a stretch. What is legally binding is that countries have to produce Nationally Determined Contributions. But the targets in the NDCs are up to each individual country. There are no binding targets in the Paris Agreement. If a country fails to meet its targets in the NDC, there is no legally binding mechanism for holding countries to account.
     
    Instead, Article 15 of the Agreement explains that the mechanism “shall consist of a committee that shall be expert-based and facilitative in nature and function in a manner that is transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive”.
  • It’s a strange time for Graßl to make the argument that fossil fuels “will soon be worth nothing”. Oil and gas companies are reporting record profits. In February 2022, BP’s chief financial officer, Murray Auchincloss, told investors that, “It’s possible that we’re getting more cash than we know what to do with.”
     
    In May 2021, the International Energy Agency concluded that there could be no new oil, gas or coal development if the world is to meet the goal of net zero emissions by 2050. Yet oil and gas corporations continue to plan massive new “carbon bomb” projects that will dramatically exacerbate the climate crisis. So the oil industry is moving in completely the wrong direction. But you wouldn’t know that from the outcome of any of the UN climate meetings, or from the Paris Agreement, which doesn’t even mention fossil fuels.

“Carbon neutral” is misleading

Graßl writes that “The Paris Agreement calls for greenhouse gas neutrality, so, for example, sinks for carbon – mostly CO2 and methane – must be as large as sources.” But “carbon neutral” is a deeply misleading term, often bandied around by the oil industry in order to give the impression that by buying offsets they are taking action to address the climate crisis. Meanwhile they continue to profit from business as usual.

We need major changes in the way societies and economies are organised in order to address the climate crisis. Simply swapping burning fossil fuels with wind and solar energy is not going to work. We need to reduce the amount of energy we consume. We need to address over-consumption generally.

Offsetting is not an option

Go vegan!

Graßl gives the example of the food “we” eat. He suggests that if we are to continue eating meat and dairy products, we “must create sinks”. But surely a better approach would be to dramatically reduce the amount of meat and dairy we eat, and to address the destruction of nature caused by industrial agriculture. Not least because the meat industry is a major driver of deforestation in the Amazon, because of land cleared for cattle ranching and for soy plantations to feed cattle.

Offsetting is not an option

Graßl mentions the other sources of greenhouse gases – peat soils, methane from former coal mines and landfills and nitrous oxide emissions as a result of nitrogen fertiliser. But he suggests that there is an alternative to stopping these emissions: compensate them.

This slide from an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presentation about the recent Sixth Assessment Report makes clear the relative importance of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel and industry. Emissions from land use, land use change, and forestry amount to 11% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while emissions from fossil fuels account for 64%. Nitrous oxide accounts for 4%. Meanwhile emissions from fossil fuel and industry have grown steadily since 1990, and by significantly more than emissions from other sectors:

Offsetting is not an option

Offsetting is not an option

My point in the article for Forum Umwelt und Entwicklung is that offsetting is not an option if we are serious about addressing the climate crisis. We need to preserve rainforests and we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground. We cannot trade the carbon stored in forests against continued emissions from fossil fuels, or methane emissions from coal mines, or nitrous oxide emissions from industrial agriculture. We cannot offset our way out of the climate crisis.

Offsetting is not an option

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Graßl’s response to my article is that it confirms my argument: offsetting is a dangerous distraction from urgently needed discussions about how to leave fossil fuels in the ground. Instead of discussing the societal and economic changes that are needed to address extractivism, over-consumption, and the problems of endless growth under capitalism, we are disagreeing about “compensation” and “carbon neutrality”.

 

5 thoughts on “Offsetting is not an option if we are serious about addressing the climate crisis. My response to Hartmut Graßl”

  1. Chris Lang says:
    13 May 2022 at 2:05 pm

    George Monbiot’s latest article in The Guardian puts the problem of hoping that renewables will displace fossil fuels very well:

    In seeking to prevent environmental breakdown, what counts above all is not the new things we do, but the old things we stop doing. Renewable power, for instance, is useful in preventing climate chaos only to the extent that it displaces fossil fuels. Unfortunately, new technologies do not always lead automatically to the destruction of old ones. . . .

    Fossil fuels will become stranded assets only when governments insist that they be left in the ground. Yet, somehow, a major strand of thinking in rich nations continues to ignore this obvious truth.

  2. Chris Lang says:
    13 May 2022 at 4:26 pm

    There’s a discussion (in German) about my article on Klimareporter° and Graßl’s response, here.

  3. Kathleen McCroskey says:
    14 May 2022 at 4:51 am

    Besides the upcoming “carbon bomb” projects by the fossil-fuel majors, there is their offloading of assets to junior companies which have no emissions plans, in order to show that they are moving towards “Net-Zero”. see:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/10/climate/oilfield-sales-pollution.html
    As with the “carbon bomb” stories, the major companies simply wish to carry on raking in the profits until the End comes. Don’t they have children?

  4. Delton Chen says:
    15 May 2022 at 6:41 pm

    My comment is that we (and by “we” I am referring to scholars, policy makers and environmentalists) have not clearly defined “growth” and “de-growth” from a policy perspective, and have not defined an optimum strategy for staying below 1.5 to 2C of global warming (to avoid ecological breakdown).

    From an objective scientific perspective it is reasonable to allow industry and businesses to offset their carbon emissions, when other options are much more expensive—but on the condition that the world is also transitioning as rapidly as possible to low-carbon energy production and consumption. If we had policies in place to rapidly decarbonise the production and consumption of energy, then we would not be debating the merits of carbon offsetting. In other words, the most rational strategy is to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible, and to allow carbon offsetting when it is needed.

    So the critical question is how do we reduce emissions as quickly as possible, and how do we remove carbon from the atmosphere as quickly as possible?

    Another critical question is this: what exactly is de-growth? There is no clear definition of what de-growth is, or how it can/should be implemented at the global level. The most objective description of de-growth is to cap total energy consumption, and this would require a global agreement for austerity—but this is contradictory to the growth bias of most governments and central banks.

    The contemporary narrative on climate change economics and policy is caught between a “rock and a hard place”, and there is no obvious pathway to avoiding >1.5C of global warming.

    Having said that, I would like to put forward the idea that there is an alternative conceptual model, which I have outlined on the website for the Global Carbon Reward (see GlobalCarbonReward.org) and Wikipedia. On this website there is an explanation for an alternative strategy that can scale-up finance for conventional mitigation and carbon dioxide removal—however this proposal is not based on “de-growth”. The difference is in the way that human cooperation is conceptualised, and how systems can actually be managed to achieve homeostasis.
    Real world systems can achieve homeostasis when they are designed as “control systems”. De-growth does not have the characteristics of a control system because it lacks a mechanism with a socially sustainable and self-reinforcing “negative feedback” on growth.

    The carbon reward is different because it seeks to utilise a mechanism that is self-reinforcing through cooperation — to effectively create a “negative feedback” on carbon emissions. There are studies that show that “carrots and sticks” maximise cooperation. The standard environmental and economic narratives both ignore this fact. This is because the standard narrative does not view the economy as an “emergent complex” system. The carbon reward seeks to provide new financial rewards (i.e. carrots) to support carbon taxes and regulations (i.e. sticks) for the goal of maximising cooperation.

    The Global Carbon Reward also includes a conceptual model for “optimal growth”, and a pricing mechanism that can balance carbon sources and sinks. The climate challenge is inherently probabilistic—and I agree that carbon credits/offsets alone cannot solve the problem. The only viable pathway for humanity is to target “net zero” emissions with a fundamentally new approach that is fit for purpose.

  5. Kathleen McCroskey says:
    16 May 2022 at 5:08 am

    These upper-middle-class notions of carbon pricing simply can’t work – you cannot balance that set of books – try it, in double-entry bookkeeping! In normal economics, raising the price of a commodity would encourage more production of said commodity. But you want to reduce its production, not increase it. So look instead at the other half (or 70%) of the equation – the oxygen that oxidizes your fuels, which you STEAL from the commons because you pay nothing for it. So my idea is to put the price on oxygen, thus people are encouraged to increase the supply of oxygen and reduce its burning. Thus we are immediately funding people to protect their old-growth forests with the side benefit of cutting carbon burning. The present practice of burying CO2 is also trashing the associated oxygen which is fossil oxygen, it MUST be returned to the atmosphere, since we keep killing off all our systems which produce the oxygen. see https://www.mccroskey.ca/kathleen/oxygen.htm
    this has been posted since 2012, stop ignoring it!

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