Public support is building for big, bold action on climate and companies are matching that enthusiasm with big bold promises to reduce their carbon emissions to zero. Well, not exactly zero, net zero. The airline industry announced a goal of net zero airline emissions by 2050. Pepsi pledges to be net zero by 2040. Amazon is looking to achieve
net zero carbon by 2040. Now, Shell wants to be net zero by 2050. Net zero is a pledge that
you won't increase the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. You can do that by decreasing
your carbon emissions to zero or keep emitting carbon, but cancel out those emissions
by purchasing carbon offsets. The idea of a carbon offset is that for every ton of carbon you
put into the atmosphere, you offset that by taking a ton of carbon out. So, instead of decarbonizing
their whole business, companies can keep
polluting and buy offsets. They can keep drinking,
throw their credit card on the bar and say, put it on my tab. Dozens of companies now sell
offsets, funding thousands of projects around the world. They do things like restore forests or replace fossil fuels
with renewable energy. And as more companies and
countries make net zero pledges, the demand for these offsets is booming. Transactions on the global carbon markets
totaled 850 billion dollars in 2021, which all raises a
pretty important question. Do these things actually work? In theory, offsets allow money to flow wherever it's cheapest and easiest to reduce emissions. That should lower global emissions faster than if everyone focused
only on lowering their own. And for operations that have
no affordable alternative to burning fossil fuel right now, offsets are better than nothing. But how offset projects work on the ground often doesn't match the theory. So here's an example. Some offsets plant trees,
which absorb carbon. Green Trees is the largest developer of these projects in North America and several large corporations
have bought their offsets to reach net zero. But a Bloomberg investigation found that Green Trees often takes credit for planting trees that
were already there. They're doing the same
thing as those guys who pose in front of somebody else's
Lambo on their Tinder profile, but for trees, which is wild. Now, the vast majority of carbon offsets don't actually claim to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. They take the form of avoided emissions. Essentially, these offsets pay people to protect trees from being cut down. But for this to work, those trees need to be a
hundred percent doomed, and a lot of time they aren't. The Nature Conservancy, the world's largest environmental group, sells avoided emissions offsets. But Bloomberg reporters found that many of the forests that they claim to preserve are in no danger of being cut down. They're not even breaking a sweat. The problem here is that carbon offsets are
essentially IOUs to the atmosphere, but the atmosphere has no power to collect those IOUs. There's no atmosphere enforcement agency. There are carbon offset registries, which validate carbon savings, but those aren't accountable to anyone. So there's a huge incentive for landowners to do as little as possible to keep that sweet offset cash rolling in. And there's a huge incentive for companies to use cheap dubious offsets to give the appearance of cutting emissions and avoid the difficult work
of actually cutting them. Now, there are a few examples
of effective offsets, like ones that take carbon
directly out of the air, which can be accurately measured, but far, far more commonly, the carbon offset market is used as a reputation laundromat and that can make climate
change even worse, by giving a false impression of progress while robbing us of time. And when it comes to
the climate emergency, time is a precious resource
that we can't afford to lose. So can the carbon offset
market clean up its act and live up to its promises? Our teams went to investigate. Take a look.
