Carbon Fiction, Part 3

This is the conclusion to Carbon Fiction, Part 1 and Part 2.

Part 3 rarely lives up to the first two in a trilogy so just for something different, let's roll credits first.

Carbon Fiction starred:

👉 A Prison, representing your community.
👉 Some Inmates, representing local businesses.
👉 Families and the media, playing... families and the media.
👉 With The Personal Guard Program™ as a Carbon Offsetting scheme.
👉 And introducing some 5 year old prison guards as Carbon Credits.

Some offset programs are credible. Many are not. But the point of these emails wasn't to question the credibility of each one. It's to highlight how much unrealistically heavy lifting we expect them to do, and look at what the alternatives are.

An important point: Planting trees isn't the only way to buy carbon offsets, I've oversimplified it here. There are dozens of ways to buy offsets (Google that one, too many to list). But tree ones abound, and they're a simple example for this purpose. Tree or otherwise, the concept is always the same: To buy something good in exchange for something harmful.

Without reducing the amount of gunk going up into the air in the first place, the saplings/trees/whatever will struggle to keep up.

A smart way to use offsets

I've come down pretty hard on offsets in this little series. I genuinely don't dislike them (which is probably why I always start with "planting trees is good but..."), but I do think they're being seriously abused. A different path needs to be considered.

One way, which is not my idea, is to use offsets as a kickstarter to get your climate action rolling.

If you have wiggle room in your profit margins, a few percent towards an offset scheme is a quick and easy way to get the ball rolling (and talk about the fact you're doing offsets, but don't claim you've saved the world yet).

The second way, once you've made some serious gains in reducing your emissions, and any further reductions are either longer projects that might take months or years, or just aren't possible to remove fully, is to offset those straggler emissions with an offset scheme.

In other words, use offsets as a booster, rather than as a solution on it's own.

How not to use offsets

💬 "We're proudly 100% carbon neutral".

No 👎

If all you've done is paid truckloads of money to an offset scheme to match your emissions, without doing any work to reduce your emissions, what you're saying here is that you've done all you can do. Problem neutralised. From now on, any work you do or products you create will in no way cause any harm ever again. Which is of course complete bulldust.

💬 "We offset 100% of our emissions, but we've got more work to do".

Better 👍

Do the offsets. Say you do the offsets. But don't wear them like a superhero cape. In truth, you've solved nothing. You deserve no badge. At absolute best, you've provided important financial support to a program that really needed that funding, and will do good work with it. You didn't save the planet, but you did a good thing.

Wrapping up

Employing 5-year-olds to guard prisoners is clearly insane. Those little kids are carrying the entire burden of the Personal Guard program on their tiny shoulders.

Employing saplings to mop up dirty air is also kinda nuts. Those little plants are carrying the entire burden of the Carbon Offsetting program on their tiny shoulders.

Offsets don't fix emissions on their own, we need to do some hard work.

There are lots of starting points. Below are a couple recently shared here:

👉 Where to start: For soloists.
👉 Where to start: For companies.

It's a really good thing to do - and there are massive upsides not just for the air, but for the organisation doing the emission reduction work.

I won't stretch this prison thing any further, but there are a lot of upsides to reducing your emissions for us to explore! Hope you'll stay tuned, and thanks for sticking around ✌️