Carbon Offsets Don't Work. Here's Why

Does anyone know who it was that described carbon offsets as "Trying to decrease infidelity in society by cheating on your wife, but paying another already faithful couple to remain faithful while you do it"

Reminds me of the church selling indulgences.

"Staying green" is a dog-whistle for "Ignore the problem and keep making money"

Alternate power sources only work when they REPLACE fossil fuels. That is why carbon offsets don't work.

Until lobbyist money is removed from politics this kind of argument will just be preaching to the choir.

We can't do our part when the basic necessities like eating enough food and having a mind that isn't constantly battered are thrown aside for some. If we do the changes needed it means not just some of us, ALL of us

We need to somehow not be so dependent on a consumerist society

I absolutely love this series. These are the arguments I was making against these schemes in my grad program in 2014 and abruptly dismissed for not having any compromise for companies

The solution is a carbon TAX. Mandatory payment for every emission across the production line, no excuses, no selling responsibilities, no offsets, no loopholes. This is the only way - if every carbon emission adds to the FINAL price, then emissions actually cost more. That incentivises everyone to go for the cheaper option which will in this case be the one with fewer emissions, no matter if it's the electricity that is produced with carbon-heavy sources, or the use of fossil fuels, or industrial emissions during production, or use of the produced chemicals, everything should scale equally with produced emissions. Every time you allow trading of responsibility, or try to micro manage every single pollution source separately, you introduce complexity that can be exploited. The market will always find a way to get around it, and make it worse.

Just have to say that PBS Terra is one of the best climate content creators in the U.S. at the moment, and definitely the best from “mainstream” media sources. Makes me proud to be a donor.

Offsetting our way to extinction.

What if a hypothetical politician or organization could somehow magically impose a very high cost to pollution without worry about getting reelected or making their corporate constituents angry?

You said that Canada has a C&T system but this is not quite true. At the national level we have a carbon tax as does British Columbia. Some other provinces such as Quebec, which is part of the same C&T scheme as California, do C&T. Some do nothing at all.

Happy Early Earth Day! 🌍🌎🌏

Plant more native gardens trees vegetables fruits berry's to provide food and keep it native to help the native wild life like bugs birds bat's yes some will visit as night time pollinators will visit so will the bat's. It also helps reduce pesticide use and water use and can help reduce flooding in cities have more green spaces.

Thank you!!

Concrete is a big problem, if we could find a way too make green concrete it would save alot.

This is like saying speeding tickets don't work because it allows drivers to speed as long as they're willing to pay their ticket fines. Would you rather polluters not pay to pollute? Then polluting would be free, like it already is.

If only there was a way to make significant, enforceable rules about how companies operate to compelling them to change. If only. I guess making rules about not allowing the companies to unduly and unethically influence the process might be important, too. Huh.

Everything you suggested sounds great if we ignore the downsides. But, yeah, carbon credits don’t work. It’s just too easy to get a credit without actually reducing emissions at all. Carbon capture is easier to measure but too expensive to be worthwhile at this point. Despite the pessimistic tone of this video, a lot of good progress has been made towards reducing carbon emissions. It’s too little too slow to avoid climate change being a big problem. But it’s hardly trivial that so many countries have managed to reduce their carbon emissions. The EU, the US, canada, Australia, and more have their emissions decreasing year over year. Solar power and grid scale storage are rapidly improving which will make it easier to transition away from fossil fuel. Which is especially important for the less wealthy countries which would otherwise struggle to reduce emissions. Electric vehicles are similarly making progress. Over the last five years the proportion of cars that are electric has steadily increased and i suspect it will continue to do so if we continue on our current path (though, I’m hoping recharge stations soon realise that they’re just gas stations and become similarly user friendly) We need to do more, and hopefully faster, until we reach net negative global carbon emissions but there’s no benefit to making it sound hopeless and like we’ve made no progress