Carbon Offsets: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

our main story tonight concerns earth it's basically the oscar isaac of planets in that it seems to be getting alarmingly hotter every year it's pretty clear this planet is not doing great the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now higher than ever in human history and a recent u.n commission climate report was called an atlas of human suffering which coincidentally is also the slogan for craigslist luckily though one group is here to fix it giant corporations many are now claiming that they've hit upon a solution becoming carbon neutral or net zero basically running their businesses in such a way that they don't increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere as of last year one in five of the world's 2000 largest publicly listed companies have now committed to a net zero emissions target which sounds great you might even have seen them bragging about their claims in ads like this one from united airlines this one from apple this one from shell and this one from an unexpected source kitkat is committing to becoming carbon neutral by 2025 reducing emissions by 50 percent through forest regeneration planting 5 million shade trees supporting regenerative farming and securing 100 renewable electricity for our factories worldwide and will offset any remaining carbon by investing in climate projects let's give the planet a break yeah even kitkat is getting involved which is a strange sales technique it's not like you decide to eat a kitkat bar because of their net zero targets you decide to eat one because you're at rock bottom and you've run out of reese's peanut butter cups that's why you do it now as for the shovel made out of a kitkat that seemed less like a sustainable farming tool and more like what you'd use to bury the body of the red m m but the key phrasing comes at the end there that they'd offset any remaining carbon that's actually a common tactic in fact one study that looked closely at the net zero promises of dozens of companies in heavily polluting industries found that two-thirds of them are relying on offsets instead of emissions reductions offsets are wildly popular even bands have promised over the years to use them to reduce the environmental impact of their tours all the greats have done this dave matthews bon jovi coldplay and even sergeant pepper's angsty victorian ghost club band my chemical romance a big tour like this uses lots of energy trucks vans lights sound and more and that has an impact on the environment so we've partnered up with a really cool non-profit organization called reverb to help us green things up one of the things that they do is figure out how much energy the tour uses then they invest in alternative energy projects to help make up for it cool thanks guys and i admit it is nice to see them represent their core fan base middle schoolers who have to give a presentation in front of the class against their will but i don't particularly care for the phrase green things up there it sounds like something shrek would say right before he reaches a sexual climax look out i'm about to green things up watch me donkey i want you to watch me look me in the eyes and yet if the idea that you can simply invest a little money and make your carbon footprint disappear sounds too good to be true that's because it absolutely is study after study has indicated that most offsets available on the market don't reliably reduce emissions and yet offsets are now the backbone of the environmental policies of many of the biggest polluters on the planet so given that tonight let's talk about carbon offsets what they are what they claim to do and how they may actually be making things even worse and let's start with some basic definitions the idea of a carbon offset is that if you emit co2 into the atmosphere you can offset it by say planting or protecting trees which remove carbon from the air or building a wind farm to replace a fossil fuel plant here is how bp a major polluter of course sells the whole idea i've been driving around and generating three tons of carbon dioxide which of course i've released into the atmosphere to join all the rest of the greenhouse gases that are already up there now imagine that miles away maybe on the other side of the world somebody else takes three tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere so what's happened three tons in three tons out results zero now that violently british man did a pretty good job of illustrating the concept there i'm not sure he needed to use the decorations from a clown's funeral to do it but i guess without them i'd never have known what it looks like when you add three to something but then take three away it simply can't be done but if that simple explanation did not do it for you here is one idiot explaining offsets to another idiot using the worst possible metaphor given who that second idiot is of course you can buy carbon offsets which is the equivalent of buying you know a diamond watch ring and necklace if you're unfaithful to your wife and say oh it's just an offset honey no problem that's right that'll work what your carbon offset is oh i can sin all i want i can put out all the emissions i want but you got to get rid of your caravan and drive a bicycle okay set aside hannity's inability to decide if he thinks carbon offsets are like buying your wife a necklace or forcing someone else to ride a bike let's just dwell on him saying the words if you're unfaithful to your wife to newt gingrich a man who was famously unfaithful to two of his three wives so far trying to get one to sign divorce documents while she was recovering from cancer surgery and asking the second for a divorce shortly after she was diagnosed with ms no wonder he just sat there silently until hannity started speaking again i'm sure he desperately wanted to get up and walk out but i guess newt would never do that to sean he only does that to people with severe illnesses but the point is offsets allow businesses that can't immediately reduce their emissions to balance things out by buying emissions reductions somewhere else and in some parts of the world they're actually a way to meet regulatory requirements on emissions places like china korea australia and california have set caps for how much companies can emit and if you go above that cap you might opt to buy an offset to get back below it but companies operating outside of those areas might still choose to buy offsets voluntarily so that they can make claims like the ones that you saw earlier in those ads the voluntary market is smaller but it is growing incredibly fast it's quadrupled to nearly two billion dollars in 2021. even you as an individual can now buy offsets you might have seen checkboxes like these on sites like ups offering you the opportunity to offset the carbon of your delivery or maybe you were offered an offset as an impulse buy while traveling travelers through austin's airport can help offset the emissions their flights put into the atmosphere it only costs two dollars and offsets more than one thousand miles of air travel now that price is obviously too low it is pretty suspicious that you could walk into an airport and offset more than a thousand miles of air travel for just two dollars then head over to a chimo express where it costs at least five times that to buy a soggy chicken wrap that somehow looks if i had to pick one descriptor recently divorced there are even boutique companies now popping up like yepu the world's first human breath carbon offset service where you can for 17 a year offset your own breath and if you just let out a huge exasperated sigh of hearing that bad news that'll cost you extra yep you also offers you the chance to offset your pets ranging from 50 cents for a hamster to six dollars for a cat all the way to ten dollars to offset your pig which again seems great aside from the fact that ten dollars to offset your pig sounds like a dutch sex act that was sent back and forth through google translate one too many times for ten dollars basilius he offshed your pigs show good show strong your eyes will pop and your brave testicles will switch shall we doing dish brazilian off shed that pig and look on some level you probably know carbon offsets are both because you're a reasonably intelligent person and because you know exactly what show you are watching right now i don't open my beak to squawk out good news this thing pops open for sad news and porridge and i'm all out of porridge right now but exactly how offsets are is really interesting because it's easy to say that you are reducing carbon emissions but it is much harder to prove it and the truth is there aren't many checks and balances in place to prevent abuse and let's start with the fact that a key criterion for any offset project is what's called additionality the idea is that an offset should provide an extra reduction of carbon that wouldn't have happened any other way for instance if you planted a tree that wouldn't otherwise have been planted that is additional as is saving a tree that would otherwise have been cut down but there are many many cases where the claim of additionality is shaky at best take jp morgan which announced that it had achieved carbon neutrality across its operations in 2020 one of the ways that it claims to have eliminated its carbon footprint is by buying almost a million dollars worth of offsets claiming to protect an area in pennsylvania called hawk mountain sanctuary but it turns out that the threats to the sanctuary were wildly overblown this is the project's planning document submitted in 2018 to the american carbon registry and this is the baseline the projects built upon that if it weren't for intervention the forest would be subject to aggressive clear cutting and high grading the problem was hawk mountain preserve as its name would suggest was already a preserve since the 1930s this area has been closely looked after managed and protected the forest didn't need saving it wasn't under threat yeah of course it wasn't and that probably should have been obvious from the fact that it was a preserve and not called the hawk mountain chop chop zone and tree murder playground as a reporter from bloomberg uncovered that offset was sold to jp morgan by the nature conservancy which has been very active in selling carbon offset projects they also sold 180 000 credits to disney which ostensibly went to protect this forest in rural pennsylvania from what the conservancy warned was a risk of significant commercial timber harvesting but you should know the nature conservancy itself had owned most of that land since 1999 and they are not famously in the commercial timber harvesting business and you might think well i don't care good for them they're taking disney's money and not having to give them anything in return but they are giving them something though namely they're given the ability to make claims like disney reduced over 4 million tons of carbon dioxide equal to taking over 900 000 cars off the road which we already know is not true but if it were i'd at least hope that they'd start with mata i don't care if he's lightning mcqueen's best friend he's choking us he's choking our planet to death also the money from offsets doesn't always go to places like the nature conservancy remember that airport plan where you could offset more than a thousand miles of air travel for just two dollars records show that this year a significant portion of the money from that program has gone to support trees at the hudson farm club in new jersey a 3 800 acre private hunting club set up by peter kellogg billionaire and model for the l.l bean heart failure of the yacht club collection here is one member explaining what happens there peter had this vision of having a place for several of his friends and additional members to hunt in new jersey and to shoot new jersey and to develop one of the best sporting clays spots in the whole northeast if not the country it's called hudson farm it's approximately 3 800 acres it's in andover new jersey it's one of the most beautiful places on earth i've ever seen and it is a hunters and shooters paradise okay first it's not just me we're we're all getting strong get out vibes from that place right it's not just me and second the hudson farm club and the carbon credit company bluesource claimed that without the money from carpet offsets 77 of its trees could be clear-cut in just five years but that clearly wasn't gonna happen it's owned by a billionaire and exists for rich guys to fantasize about shooting animals in the wild right down to this life-sized carpool cutout of a buffalo on four wheels in fact i'd argue the only real damage that might happen there is from that guy you saw talking earlier who seems in real danger of casually shooting off his own nut sack and with the market for carbon offsets increasing there are now companies actively recruiting almost anyone who has a tree to get in on the action firms like these are in the business of finding small land owners and connecting them with companies who pay them not to cut down their trees pitching themselves with ads like this one from ncx we're in a critical decade for the climate and forests are a powerful natural solution for removing carbon from the atmosphere ncx's forest data scientists developed the first high resolution forest map of every acre of america now every land owner and every acre of forest can be part of the climate solution right basically they will pay you to leave your trees alone which is a pretty good deal as it should be easy not to cut down trees unless of course we're talking about this one because honestly this tree it has at least seven different eyes teeth and it seems to be vomiting up a bush you look like the giving tree if all it gave you was nightmares and was written by h.b lovecraft i hate this tree and with ncx you don't even have to promise never to cut your trees down as they give you the option to still get paid simply to defer cutting them down for as little as one year but a 12 month delay doesn't really benefit the planet much as one expert that we talked to frankly it's akin to selling a carbon credit for holding your breath for 15 seconds also there's a much bigger problem with all of these tree based programs which is that even if they do protect one section of trees from logging that doesn't necessarily mean much if a logging operation simply cuts down the trees on the land next door instead plus given that forest fires are now on the rise thanks to climate change offset programs can and have literally gone up in flames all of this is why while companies love to make big broad claims about the benefits of their offsets they really don't like getting into the details take the airline ryanair a few years ago they began a voluntary program where customers could contribute one euro to help offset their flight pointing to tree planting schemes in ireland and portugal that would help them do that but an expert later found those schemes offset just 0.01 of ryanair's 2019 emissions and when its ceo was pressed on this he got a little defensive the point here is that you've got a large and growing airline that emits a lot of carbon dioxide and your offsetting scheme nowhere near absolutely meets that but there's an irish forest isn't there in ross common yeah which is seven hectares i mean it is nothing from little acorns grow mighty trees if you've only got seven hectares you're only going to get seven eggs worth of mighty oak sauce we started this in the last year i mean we're working with four projects a re you know we're replanting trees in monchique in portugal we're supporting whales and dogs which has nothing to do with carbon dioxide bizarre which has nothing to do with carbon dioxide but it's good for the environment yeah i don't think any of our customers will object to supporting whales and dolphins in ireland okay it's not that people would object to that of course people love whales and dolphins whales are big honking boys who up water out of their heads and dolphins are smooth friendly water dogs who cackle like demonic babies they're both excellent but protecting them isn't the thing that you promised it's like if you asked your husband to pick up your kids from school and he came home childless but with a pizza you're not mad at the pizza no one's ever mad at the pizza but it's not the important thing that he said he was gonna do the problem with carbon offsets is everyone wants to believe in them buyers want a cheap way to make a big claim and sellers want money for doing as little as possible and ideally there'd be an entity in the middle charged with keeping both sides honest and there actually is they're called carbon offset registries and they are supposed to be neutral third parties who sign off on the efficacy of potential offsets these four are the major ones in the voluntary offset market but those registries aren't really accountable to anyone technically you or i could start a registry and given that they are paid by the company selling the offset it will not surprise you to learn that many experts say their standards are far too low as exemplified by the fact the hawke mountain preserve the disney forest and the hunting club all met the standards of the american carp and registry basically getting a sign off from a carbon registry is like winning a kid's choice award it doesn't really mean much but it will help you temporarily look a little bit greener and look the problem isn't those projects themselves it is good to protect forests but the issue is claiming that they cancel out carbon emissions because truly offsetting carbon is technically possible theoretically if a wind farm gets built to replace a fossil fuel plant that had zero likelihood of getting built otherwise that could be a genuine offset but real world examples of that are incredibly hard to find one study of wind turbine projects in india for instance found that at least 52 of approved carbon offsets were for projects that would very likely have been built anyway which causes real damage because polluters in countries that cap emissions bought those offsets and when you buy an offset so you can pollute more and that offset is you're now actively making things worse in fact that study argues the sale of those offsets substantially increased global carbon dioxide emissions which clearly is not very good and there is one final way that carbon offsets can cause harm because when that bp spokesperson with the goth balloons referred to building an offsetting project miles away maybe on the other side of the world it is worth remembering that people might be living there a decade ago the swedish energy agency announced that it had bought carbon credits from a company called green resources which said it had planted pine forests in uganda that could offset carbon emissions elsewhere the problem was thousands of rural ugandans were evicted by the ugandan government to make room for the plantation including this man whose family once farmed a large plot of land there when i was seven years old i started herding cattle the other kids and i heard the livestock on our land there were rocks which were remnants from my great great grandfather's day do you have a possibility to just show us where your land was uh-uh no that would be a problem i can get in trouble if i show you the land that's obviously awful no one should ever be scared to show someone a piece of land unless of course that janky tree is on it if there were any squirrels living in you they have since died of embarrassment and i hope that you know that and the swedish energy agency will point out that they've now backed away from that ugandan project but i will point out that they only did that after that new segment that you just saw embarrass them on swedish television and they were completely fine with it until then so it seems at best the benefits of carbon offsets are wildly overstated while the harm they can do is very real and while there are ongoing efforts to at least improve the standards of registries the truth is offsets aren't the answer here fundamentally we cannot offset our way out of climate change even the current ceo of united airlines knows this he's one of the few heads of a fossil fuel dependent company who's actually willing to acknowledge how inadequate offsets can be the real challenge we have globally is that mankind produces 4 000 times as many emissions as we did in the pre-industrial era and most of these carbon offset projects are about planting trees there's not room on the planet to plant 4 000 times as many trees it simply can't be the answer and the problem with it is is it's the easy solution it's the solution that if you're sitting in the c-suite you can write a check and check the box and have a marketing message that i've offset all my car but you really haven't done anything he's right that airline ceo is right although it does speak to the seductive power of offsets that even his company can't seem to give them up because if you go to the united airlines website right now you will find a page where you can offset your flight in front of a picture of a forest so at least one of those people sitting in the c-suite happily checking a box is the ghost of mark zuckerberg future but it is true that there literally isn't enough space for every company to plant trees and fulfill their own net zero pledge by one estimate there's only about 500 million hectares of land left that can be dedicated to new forest for carp and capture and shell alone has proposed planting a tenth of that amount the bottom line is we have an offset system that places profits over science and the rules regulating it are just far too lacks and the reason i know that is remember when i said five minutes ago that i could set up a carbon registry you already knew where this was heading right you knew if they had a loophole where i could set up a registry establish whatever standards i wanted and start listing projects that i was going right through that loophole right you knew that was gonna happen well i'm glad to say that you were correct we set up oliver's offsets carbon registry and i'm thrilled to announce an exciting new project that meets our exacting standards so please come with me because as you're about to see we have trees in our studio now trees that you can help protect while also offsetting your personal carbon footprint now are any of these trees really under threat i'm certainly going to tell you that they are because i will cut down every single one of these here i'll do it maybe there are birds living in here or whales who knows but don't worry you can save these trees simply by sending me one dollar we are issuing 10 000 carbon credits each of which will stop me cutting this tree down for exactly five minutes all you have to do is go to oliversoffsets.org pay me a dollar and in return we will send you back a card that you can use as proof that you are now carbon neutral we're making big claims while doing very little which honestly is entirely reflective of the system that we currently have so why not offset your carbon today all proceeds will go to saving irish whales and dolphins and who on earth would have a problem with that anyway that's our show thank you so much for watching [Applause] you

Channel: LastWeekTonight

Views: 5,417,236

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Id: 6p8zAbFKpW0

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 22 2022