Ever heard a company advertise that they’re going “carbon neutral” in the near future? If you’re reading this column online, you probably have. Carbon neutrality is a popular new marketing phrase that’s emerged only as a result of decades of environmental activism pressuring companies to confront their role in today’s climate crisis. It’s no wonder why, either — most of us care about making ethical purchases and would like to support companies invested in the preservation of our planet. The truth about carbon neutrality, however, is that most Americans don’t understand what it entails. Neutrality for most companies means a reliance on carbon offsetting, wherein companies buy shares in projects, foreign or domestic, which promise to neutralize an amount of a carbon-equivalent greenhouse gas similar to some proportion of that company’s emissions. Examples of such projects include reforestation campaigns, methane capture facilities and wind farms. While these programs are somewhat helpful, they are posed as a substitute to the more serious change that is necessary, and that’s not to mention the many perils and calculation failures that can render an offset illegitimate. Considering these factors, the process holds problematic implications at best, and, at worst, is little more than a fraudulent PR scheme.
Carbon offset today is, to put things lightly, unreliable. Clients of offset projects are more concerned with credit for reducing their footprint than they are the actual impact of their investments, and third parties must be employed to hold offset projects accountable to their claims. Right now, there’s a logjam of competing registries developed both privately and publicly — regulatory bodies which are still unreliable. Overestimation of offset carbon is rampant. An investment is supposed to correspond to a set amount of sequestered carbon, and when mistakes are made, holding people accountable presents new challenges. Offsets produce unexpected consequences as well — in 2014 the U.N. and World Bank were funding an effort to buy reserve lands in Kenya, which dispossessed communities of an already marginalized indigenous group. The baseline data for reforestation projects can be flawed where existing preservation efforts overlap with offset projects. The Nature Conservancy, a leading environmental group recording over a billion dollars in revenue, bought up land for conservation in Eastern Pennsylvania that was already being protected as a bird sanctuary, and then distributed carbon credits to investors as savings against a baseline of total deforestation which was never considered by the land’s original benefactors. Even when projects aren’t overtly fraudulent, they’re vulnerable to illegal deforestation and natural disasters — especially fires, which are more and more prevalent each year.
To me, the reliance of multinational energy corporations on climate offsets indicates something more fundamental about their capacity to bring forward climate justice, or rather, their incapacity. Corporations flock to the cheapest and least reliable means of reform for the same reason they’re driven towards the cheapest and least reliable carbon offset projects — the sacred and eternal profit incentive. Energy companies deal almost entirely in pollution — they hold the greatest stake in the death of our planet while our regulating political institutions politely ask them to stop, defanged by a steady trickle of lobby spending. Carbon offset is just another heel-dragging strategy in the face of mounting pressures, and until multinational energy conglomerates are forced to accept the future — which means broadscale divestment from oil, coal and natural gas — they should be held in our society’s utmost contempt. This may sound like a pretty shallow analysis, but we evidently aren’t as disgusted by pollution as we imagine ourselves to be. Despite literally bringing the apocalypse upon us, fossil fuel companies take advantage of trillions of dollars in subsidies from world governments. This is insanity.
And indeed, this insanity is driven by our own apathy. The direct action necessary to confront polluters, or to confront our own worthless government which facilitates them, has been replaced by a culture of “ethical consumerism.” Our “every purchase plants a tree,” a smidgen of a tax write-off for some rich boomer with nothing at stake in regards to our planet’s future. Most students here at Binghamton University are educated enough to know that “carbon footprints” are a ploy by gas companies to reframe responsibility, but does this make us feel too innocent? Our excessive privilege has rendered us yet incapable of seizing power to protect our environment from those that do commit crimes against it. Consider our state’s military, which emits more carbon than some entire developed countries. We have a responsibility to uphold.
Two Septembers ago, Greta Thunberg spoke in Montreal amid global climate strikes which she directly inspired. While others around the world hunger from the droughts Americans have idly facilitated, will we choose to hunger for justice this September? Can we finally acknowledge our active responsibility to topple fossil fuel dependence, or will we rich people wallow in our imagined disempowerment, vainly minimize our individual impacts and let the global South reap the harshest consequences of this grave injustice? The myth of ethical consumerism amongst environmentalists is an internalization of corporate propaganda. Only through vigilant and tenacious protest, disruption and other direct political actions can we enact meaningful change. Therefore it is not enough to remove ourselves from the equation, we must actively resist the capital forces which perpetuate today’s climate crisis, as well as their collaborators within the state. This September, worldwide school climate strikes have once again been called upon, who among our community leaders will answer?
For more information about School Strike For Climate’s Sept. 23rd Protests, read here.
Jacob Wisnock is a sophomore double-majoring in sociology and political science.