The effects fundamentally do not seem offsetable. The offset industry is based on an idea that you can remove greenhouse impacts from your process without a significant impact on prices, and a corporation is somehow better positioned to donate to a fund than a consumer is. That's bullshit.
So yes, they are also junk.
This is so fucked up...
Someone willing to extract CO2 from the air and store it in some rock forever can indeed offset some carbon you emitted.
The reality is that nobody is doing that - instead the fraudulent offsetting companies are getting paid to do something they wanted to do anyway - for example planting trees for papermaking, or just plain-old lying about what they're doing.
Except that doing so requires more energy than you got out of the process which created the CO2 in the first place.
The only way to mitigate climate change is to keep CO2, in the form of Hydrocarbons, in the ground in the first place.
If we have any hope at averting the worst case scenario we would be start globally marking proven reserves as "never to be extracted". As it stands we are on course to release all of the CO2 stored in currently leaded fossil fuel reserves. We can slow that process down a bit by regulation, but it will matter on the scales we're working with.
That's fossil fuels for you: they are nothing more than an energy loan which we have to pay back with interest.
This is actually very common.
Here me out - EVs are not bad and in most scenarios produce less emissions than ICE vehicles. But they are similarly used to displace guilt about emissions.
EVs don’t eliminate emissions as some assume. They just displace them further up the supply chain. And if electricity is generated primarily by coal (which is the case in China, for example, which boasts about EVs) then it actually increases emissions. EVs aren’t inherently cleaner, but they do inherently hide emissions.
This does not describe every proponent of EVs but it does describe too many proponents of EVs.
This isn't what carbon offsets typically are though.
More like this: I promise not to slash and burn this forest if you give me $1000. There, you've now removed however many CO2 from being emitted, meanwhile I sell the forest to someone else who either makes the same deal with some other guy or just cuts it down because whatever they aren't under any obligations to not slash and burn the forest.
Typically it's burned to make CO2.
CO2 lasts longer in the atmosphere than methane.
Better yet to actually use it for something that will offset fossil fuel use though.
I think they burn the various CFCs and HFCS they extract from old refrigeration units for similar reasons.
However before it breaks down methane is a wildly more potent greenhouse gas. It still takes decades to break down, during which time it's going to be multiple magnitudes more impactful that the CO2 it will eventually become either way.
I wondered the same thing. It’s hard to imagine a single non-junk example. If we could just pay money to undo emissions then none of this is even a problem.