Delta was sued over its carbon offset claims. It's not the only company misleading us about its emissions reduction efforts. - Slate
Delta was sued over its carbon offset claims. It’s not the only company misleading us about its emissions reduction efforts.
Airlines want you to feel good about riding in their sky-high gas guzzlers. Which is why they’re investing in lots of pro-environment advertising, hyping themselves up as allies in the fight to mitigate climate change. Don’t worry, the wall decals and in-flight napkins assure you: This energy-inefficient airport and all those carbon-spewing planes are going green, and fast. They’re recycling discarded fuels, they’re developing “sustainable” gases for plane engines, and, hey, they might already be “carbon-neutral”—to take Delta’s word for it—because they’re canceling out their greenhouse-gas emissions. How? Through carbon offsets.
“Carbon offsets” are a catchall for the various climate-beneficial actions a company can take to reduce or remove carbon emissions, mainly through supporting green projects that could not have been finished without some extra help: planting trees, investing in clean power plants, funding carbon- and methane-capture facilities. Often, polluting firms will tell consumers that they can pitch a few extra bucks of their own in order to, say, help plant some new seedlings. The goal of offsetting is to zero out corporations’ climate impacts; that atmospheric gas that your plane farted out en route to Heathrow is as good as gone, because it will eventually be displaced by the green-energy transition, or get sucked up by the new trees and carbon vacuums we supported. That’s the pitch, anyway. “Travel confidently knowing that we will offset the carbon emitted on your Delta flight,” the flimsy cocktail napkin informs you as you sip from your on-flight drinks. Hooray!
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Funny thing about those napkins, though. They’re actually evidence in a class-action lawsuit that was filed in California on Tuesday, taking Delta to task for “grossly misrepresenting the total environmental impact of its business operations” by “misstat[ing] the actual carbon reduction produced by their carbon offset portfolio”—thanks to offset transactions that are “replete” with “inaccurate accounting,” “non-immediate speculative emissions reductions,” and “impermanent projects.” The plaintiff is a TV writer who says Delta’s “carbon-neutral” signposting misled her and that “she would not have purchased said flights on the same terms had they known those representations were not true.”
She’s far from the only one to question the true impact of Delta’s climate governance, especially when it comes to offsets. Last year, Bloomberg reported that “Delta’s largest single source of renewable offsets, the Los Cocos II wind farm in the Dominican Republic … almost certainly didn’t need additional support”—meaning that the wind project did not make up for Delta’s additional emissions in any substantive way. In 2021, the Guardian and Greenpeace jointly reported that Verra, an offsets-approving nonprofit utilized by Delta and other major companies, employed careless methodologies to “generate credits that have no impact on the climate whatsoever”; a follow-up investigation in January revealed that “more than 90% of their rainforest offset credits … do not represent genuine carbon reductions,” which perhaps led Verra’s CEO to resign just last month.
A Delta spokesperson told the Associated Press that the California lawsuit is “without legal merit,” further stating that “since March 31, 2022, [Delta] has fully transitioned its focus away from carbon offsets toward decarbonization of our operations.” Still, the term fully transitioned may not be fully accurate by Delta’s own account. In its 2022 Environment, Social, and Governance Report, Delta repeatedly touted its continued participation in the international Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation agreement, while including “investing in strategic offsetting projects” as part of its medium- and long-term management strategies. (The report likewise notes, however, that Delta “expects much of” its remaining sustainability budget to “focus on solutions other than offsets.”)
Delta isn’t the only company to have factored ineffective offsets into “carbon-neutral” branding. Last summer, Dutch carrier KLM—which had already gotten in trouble for its misleading “Fly CO2 Zero” branding—was sued by environmental organizations for falsely branding its flights as sustainable, thanks in part to customer-funded offsets that would go toward biofuels (which, for the last time, are not environmentally friendly alternatives to fossil fuels!). Just last month, a corporate watchdog reported that “93% of the offsets Chevron bought … were too environmentally problematic to be classified as anything other than worthless or junk.” Another oil giant, Shell, claimed in 2019 that it was funding reforestation efforts in Peru to zero out its emissions—even though the forest it mentioned was already protected by Peru’s government from any illegal logging. Similarly, as Bloomberg reported in 2020, juggernauts like JPMorgan Chase and Disney worked with the Nature Conservancy to pour money toward forest conservation—and the nonprofit directed that cash to forests that didn’t actually need any protection. If you were to print out a complete accounting of additional examples, such as the $410 million of California offsets trades that did nothing to reduce carbon emissions, you’d probably have to raze a whole forest.
The basic idea behind carbon offsetting is fine and reasonable: A company that can’t avoid emitting certain amounts of carbon in the near-term (e.g., airplanes that can’t yet be powered by batteries) can at least throw some money toward green efforts that could use the help. And it’s not like all of these initiatives are junk. Indian foresters, Mississippian solar farms, and Tanzanian hunter-gatherer tribes appear to have genuinely benefited from targeted offsets-based operations that funnel needed capital into underresourced regions trying to go green. But only 4 percent of offsets do any net good at all, according to data compiled by the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, a global coalition of lawmakers, private enterprises, and environmental groups working to improve emissions-reduction systems. Despite this pathetic showing, offsets-focused startups and projects still earn millions of dollars in investments every year, local and national governments continue to implement offsets programs of their own, and firm global regulations to ensure that carbon offsets actually offset carbon remain elusive. As a result, oil companies that obstructed climate action for decades can factor offsets into their “net zero” goals, even if their money isn’t doing much at all to, say, preserve Mexican forestry or improve irrigation practices on Chinese rice paddies.
It’s not that carbon offsets have to suck—it’s more that they’re poorly overseen, little understood, and harmfully relied on as a magical solution. Offsets only do any good alongside legitimate actions to reduce a firm’s carbon output; if you’re releasing the same amount of greenhouse gases each year while relying solely on bad offsets to be “sustainable,” well, you’re not exactly zeroing out your emissions, are you? This is why multiple researchers and environmentalists say that offsets should only be pursued in conjunction with substantive, direct decarbonization: using more renewable energy, cutting down land use, reducing stockpiles of high-polluting and energy-sucking machines, ending reliance on petroleum byproducts, electrifying buildings, weather-proofing supply chains and factories.
Beyond that, companies should require more advanced knowledge on where their money is going and what it’s doing, from the first wire transfer to the final result. Merely planting more trees wherever you can does little good; we need more trees and less deforestation, sure, but tree-planting projects need to take into account which trees are best suited to a local environment, how much land and space is available for such forestry, how susceptible a given forest is to disasters like wildfires (which have already burned up plenty of trees that were seeded as offsets, RIP), which green plots could benefit most from new seedlings, how long these trees can actually survive, last, and thrive while slurping up carbon. If you plant the wrong types of trees within a given geographic area, you’re doing more harm than good. Offsets are not limited to the woods, but if corporations want to hone in on carbon-capture facilities and restoring soil quality, they should … actually make sure those projects are viable and effective, instead of dumping some spare change and walking away.
That’s assuming these companies actually want to do something about climate change instead of using eco-friendliness for public relations, a trend often referred to “ greenwashing.” In a bit of good news, however, some governments are taking overdue steps to crack down on this type of misleading eco-advertising. The Environmental Protection Agency wants tougher standards on the common (and commonly misused) arrow-recycling logo. South Korea may pass a law that would fine companies that falsely tout green credentials. European nations are implementing stricter legal definitions of “carbon neutrality.” An Australian regulator got nearly two dozen native corporations to retract misleading public language regarding their sustainability goals. The fashion industry stopped utilizing a sketchy mechanism for “ measuring environmental impacts” altogether after the Norwegian government probed its faulty data. Maybe it’s time world governments got together to figure out how offset the damages of carbon offsets once and for all.
As for you? You can start by never believing anything you read on a napkin.