Carbon Upsets

On the profit motive for carbon offsets, and the need for better ecological education.

One of my instructors in my Conservation course told us a story in class about his time working for Greening Australia, Australia’s premier environmental restoration non-for-profit. Around ten years ago, GA was contracted to plant a certain number of trees as per their carbon sinks initiative, only to find that the soil was particularly unsuitable that day. The soil was waterlogged from all the recent rain and water kept spurting out of the holes dug into the ground for the saplings. My instructor questioned the need to plant that day and requested that even if they had to plant, a robust monitoring program had to be put in place to ensure that most of the saplings survived. However, GA’s management refused. They had already recieved the contract to plant and additional monitoring costs money. In their view, the long-term consequences were someone else’s concern. Sure enough, most of the saplings died.

When I worked as bush crew for GA in 2021, I too experienced similar things. During my time there, I noticed a shift in GA’s contracts towards ‘carbon offset’ projects. The basic premise of carbon offsets is that an activity that reduces carbon emissions is performed to compensate for emissions made elsewhere. Under the Emissions Reduction Fund in Australia, this is done through carbon credits, wherein every carbon credit represents one tonne of carbon dioxide removed from or avoided entering the atmosphere…