Nations and especially corporations would rather talk about “net” emissions, as if in addition to regular smokestacks and tailpipes they also have a different sort, that suck CO2 out of the air and turn it into brown sugar or something.
This is an amazing feat of futurism: the man literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about– what technologies, deployed by who, when?– but he knows what proportion of his work he can rely on them to accomplish.
Truthfully, the science-will-save-us thing has worn a little thin.
Spitball some numbers in the conference room, and your environmental “plan” can be done in an afternoon! Naturally, carbon-balance-in-the-future is popular with outfits that, in the meantime, emit the carbon and make the money.
If you don’t own the land they’re growing on, you aren’t actually in a position to guarantee that they ever will.
The period of time for which you are required to hold up your end of the deal should be the period of time for which your current and future emissions are going to continue to heat the earth.
If you want credit for “your” trees, show us that but for your investment, the acreage in question would have been treeless.
One is developed areas, cities and towns, where the roads and buildings, the parking lots and playing fields and lawns don’t leave much space for trees.
There are oceans, deserts, tundra, our few remaining glaciers– so have at it! Buy half of the Sudan, say, and truck in a billion tons of topsoil, and irrigate the whole thing in perpetuity.
The only physically real way to combat global warming is to reduce current emissions.
There’s another sort of environmental accounting which is not as gauzy as the future-trees make-a-wish carbon offset, and that is the measurement of our continuing subsidy of the fossil fuels industry.