The more research I do about this situation, the more dire the situation looks to me.
But fear not, for many large companies, and even some countries have committed to go carbon neutral at some point.
It is a manifestation of months of research from my side.
While the company may claim various things about how they plan to do that, offsets play a significant role.
In fact almost any company with such a claim will somehow end up using carbon offsets to achieve net zero.
You see, this concept of polluting here, and offsetting the emitted carbon somewhere else is not a new scheme.
The voluntary carbon market is valued over $1 Billion, and is poised to grow even more this year.
So it goes something like this: a guy buys up a lot of forest land in places where deforestation is high.
This person then goes to a non profit, like Verra, and says “I have a piece of land that will be gone if I don’t take care of it”.
Verra then gives this project 1 credit for every metric tonne of carbon the project eliminates.
There are pretty much only a couple organisations that do all the checking, and give these projects credits: The Gold Standard, and Verra.
So we can definitely say that the money is benefitting the environment, and without the money, this wouldn’t happen.
Finally, how would we justify the permanence of these trees? Many of these reports mainly deal with the permanence factor.
But then again, the issue is that many of these losses are not reported in the first place.
What I mean by that is that the people who conserve these forests are doing them for a profit.
But at the same time, preventing trees from being cut down does not necessarily mean we are cutting CO2 emissions.
Over time I really hope the industry focuses more on these fields, as the grey area is much lesser on those.
Also, to bridge the gap between unregulated chaos and stringent federal regulations, there are non profits like CarbonPlan, as mentioned before, who review these projects and cross verify them with their own research and rate them.
Glaciers are melting and falling into the ocean, rising the sea level, and threatening to sink cities that are low-lying.
As much as the global idea of offsetting is true, the immediate surroundings take a significant hit from all the polluting that is happening.
While I would like to end this article on a hopeful note, I really cannot.
We need more awareness and set high, yet achievable standards to hold ourselves accountable for.