2/3 of the carbon offsets market don’t reduce emissions

Many companies are planning to hit their carbon reductions through purchasing offsets. From the article, "And Microsoft Corp. and Google recently vowed to erase all of the historic carbon emissions from their operations, which will require them to buy millions of offsets (most cost about $8 to $10 per credit)."

Unfortunately, many offsets are "empty". "about two-thirds of offset projects allowed into this market don’t represent true emissions reductions, say academics studying the projects." Researchers found that many projects would have been built with or without the carbon funds, and many possible carbon-releasing developments weren't going to happen anyway.

Kudos to Lyft for announcing they won't use offsets to hit their sustainability targets.

Salut to Stripe for indisputably reducing carbon in the atmosphere by paying to actually remove it. "Stripe recently paid $775 per ton to Climeworks AG, a Swiss company that uses renewable geothermal energy to capture CO2 from the air, concentrate it, and store it underground in rock formations. In this case, the carbon payment from Stripe is causing the reduction to happen, because there is no other reason for Climeworks to carry out this expensive process."