It is an alluring phrase, as it allows countries to keep emitting carbon dioxide, while compensating for those emissions with offsets.
One offset project they got involved in reduced deforestation in Kenya by providing families with efficient woodburning cookstoves rather than open-air fires that they traditionally use, which provided jobs locally and better indoor air quality.
The Kyoto protocol jolted the college into action and it got to work reducing its consumption to 10 per cent below its pre-1990 levels by 2012, as set out in the international agreement.
Jack Byrne, the director of sustainability integration, says that the college replaced the 2.3 million gallons of fuel oil it burned with wood chips from a $13 million biomass gasification system that Middlebury constructed.
But the story of carbon neutrality is complicated and the whole idea is still nebulous.
The voluntary carbon offset market is intransparent, loosely regulated and incentivises the sale of more and more carbon offsets, rather than pushing companies or institutions to actually cut down their emissions.
Niklas Kaskeala is the chief impact officer for Compensate, a Finish non-profit foundation that offers help to companies and consumers – including the London School of Economics – looking to offset emissions in a concrete way.
“Obviously, the quality of gold is different”, he says, which is indicated by carats.
Compensate has a scientific advisory committee which points the organisation in the right direction towards offset projects that will do what they say on the tin.
Some 90 per cent of projects don’t reach Compensate’s standards.
As if finding good offsets wasn’t a hard enough problem, carbon neutrality itself can mean different things to different people.
Prof Eckard Helmers, an environmental chemistry expert from the University of Applied Sciences Trier, says that universities are quantifying only some of their emissions.
Furthermore, he adds, universities can only reach low emissions – never mind carbon neutrality – by switching to a 100 per cent green energy supply.
“First, the operational energy consumption has to be decreased as far as possible by renovation, insulation and other other measures, maybe some new buildings – that’s very essential.
“In China”, Helmers says, “they will become carbon neutral maybe in 2060 or so.
A study co-authored by Helmers found that only a small number of universities around the world collect and publish their carbon footprints, and there was limited consistency between the reported footprints.