January 27, 2022

Back to Basics: What's the deal with offsets?

Welcome back to The Planet You Save, a weekly newsletter on local climate action. I’m Taylor Kate Brown and these teenagers are saying no to building new gas stations in their town.

This week we’re returning to Back to Basics, a series where I answer your questions about climate jargon and facts you’re embarrassed to ask. Our first edition was on what qualifies as a greenhouse gas and how it fits into the broader category of pollution. Read it here. Today I’m tackling a common question with a far more complicated answer.

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A newsletter reader asks:

What’s the deal with carbon credits or offsets? I’m getting a lot of ads for them. Do they actually plant trees?

It’s a great question, and you’re certainly not alone in being confused. The shortest answer is this: it’s probable trees are being planted when you buy a carbon offset advertising as such, but it’s unclear if that will cancel out the amount of emissions you want it to.

Confused? That’s fair. Persistent questions about offsets are due in part to existing reporting on how offsets can go wrong and part because they are often dependent on quantifying something that is not happening.

Many news and climate organizations have tried to come to a succinct answer on whether offsets are worth it, and have near-universally come back with a resounding “it depends”. 

“Trying to understand carbon offsets is like stepping into quicksand,” one author writes.

So while I won’t be solving what some of the best climate communicators haven’t been able to, I can describe what goes into that “depends”.

Where do you see offsets?


As an individual, you’re most likely to come across offsets in three different ways:

• A consumer-facing company buying offsets as part of their “impact” or “sustainability” work and markets that action to their customers. Last week, I sent a personal gift using Etsy, which informed me right in the shopping cart that they offset all emissions connected with shipping on their platform. More on this later.

• A difficult-to-decarbonize industry offers you the option to purchase offsets for your portion of emissions from their product. Some airlines do this, or buy the offsets themselves.

• Direct-to-consumer purchases: a broker will sell you parts of projects they’re purchasing to offset your emissions-producing activity, sometimes for the whole year or on a monthly basis. These groups will often include emissions calculator on their site for ease of use.

Offsets are not the same thing as state cap-and-trade programs or carbon pricing policies, because they are voluntary. But the voluntary carbon market is growing (likely more than $1 billion in 2021).

What’s the idea? 

Offsets take the amount of greenhouse gas pollution produced from a specific activity and pays for a project (or a portion of the project) that would remove or avoid the equivalent amount of emissions from the atmosphere.

Projects can happen anywhere in the world, based on the idea that as we have only one atmosphere, where we remove emissions doesn’t particularly matter. (Granted, this doesn’t help any other localized air pollution issues). Most of the projects are in the developing world, but there’s plenty of offerings in the U.S. as well.  

Planting trees or preserving forests are a popular option, but offset projects can come in all kinds of flavors. Remember my Etsy purchase? When the company announced they’d be offsetting all shipping in 2019, they included three examples of projects they’d be supporting: conserving 10 million trees in Minnesota, investing in a wind power project in India and financing the development of a technology that would reduce a powerful non-carbon dioxide greenhouse gas from the auto-industry. 

Some other kinds of examples: Projects that trap and store emissions in industrial context, capturing landfill methane or methane from abandoned coal mines, buying cleaner burning stoves for communities, restoring carbon-sink ecosystems (shout out to peat!) and yes, planting trees.

What’s the problem then?

There are indeed outright scams and speculative business attempts that go nowhere. But there are also very real projects of all kinds.

Real offsets still have plenty of critics: objections mostly fall into two major categories: lack of overall quality or ability to verify the true amount of emissions avoided, and using offsets to avoid solving difficult but doable pollution problems.

First, let’s get into quality:

There are third-party certification programs and some consensus on what a good quality offset should aim for. Here’s the major questions involved:

• Does it go beyond what’s already happening or would have happened? Was Etsy’s Minnesota forest truly at risk for being cut down? Would the wind project in India have happened anyway because of favorable market conditions? Was this mangrove restoration project already being supported through conservation grants? I don’t know the answers to these specific questions, but verifiers should be doing on-the-ground research and following up to make sure the project is adding to emission reductions.

• Has the project just shifted the emissions to somewhere else? For example, if a company wants to cut down 100 acres of forest total, and your offset project buys 20 acres that were targeted, in theory, the company could just find a different 20 acres, not just settle for 80 acres and call it a day.

• Is it permanent? You can’t sell an offset on restoring or saving a forest if there’s no assurance that it won’t be destroyed or cut down for quite some time, usually at least 100 years.

• Is it counted only once?

Etsy cites their own offset supplier, 3Degrees, as the source for the estimated emissions their offsets will remove or avoid. 3Degrees in turn says these projects are also certified under well-known third-party verification groups.

Which brings us back to ads for tree-planting. Without knowing the particular company or project, it’s difficult to say if they actually plant trees. As an individual, you can investigate a little deeper to see if the company clarifies which broker they’re working with and other basic details of verification. If you don’t see at least that, I’d pass.

Checking their work on deeper questions of quality is a level of research you and I simply don’t the time or skill to do. When you’re buying an offset from a broker or making a purchase based on a company’s offsetting promise, you’re fundamentally trusting they and their broker have done appropriate research and not overstated the impact of the project.

The second criticism is more philosophical: Offsets are almost always a way to try to negate emissions already made, not preventing it directly at the source or removing additional emissions on the road to absolute zero. 

Put it another way: if you bought an offset for a plane trip, it’s very unlikely to fund making planes operate on less fossil fuel or investing in high-speed rail that would remove the need for some flights. As this explainer from Vox asks: “What would you do if you couldn’t just buy offsets?” 

That answer might honestly be nothing, especially for individuals. But for businesses, including ones that are direct emitters, buying up offsets could get them to “zero” without truly reducing their emissions. The argument here is that offsets are simply outsourcing a pollution problem, and not changing anything fundamental about how high-polluting countries and businesses work. 

Offsets can be used to fund real greenhouse gas emission reductions projects, including some with extra benefits to the environment or people. And if you’re interested in a specific project, offsetting is a relatively cheap way to get involved. But if you’re looking for a way to assuage guilt for actions you either can or can’t control, offsets can’t solve that for you. 

Some other good resources and perspectives on offsetting:

• The Vox explainer.

• NRDC and Yale Climate Communications answer to this question.

• Executive director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium on the most cost-effective way to buy carbon offsets.

• Carbon Markets, Illustrated.

• Countries finally agreed to create an international carbon market. Here’s why it’s controversial.

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