Back in 2006 I left a career in law because I was excited by the idea of carbon offsets. With a partner, I ran tests providing fuel efficient stoves to schools

Back in 2006 I left a career in law because I was excited by the idea of carbon offsets. With a partner, I ran tests providing fuel efficient stoves to schools which used wood fuel from non-sustainable sources in southern African countries. The logic was the new stoves used less fuel than old stoves, thereby creating offsets which we could sell to tourists. We folded after the pilot for the following reasons: 1. We couldn’t prove the schools didn’t plough the money saved on fuel into other items with a carbon footprint, eg fuel for buses. 2. We started to wonder what the availability of offsets did to offset buyers psychologically and whether offering our offsets may give people a sort of licence to continue over-consuming fossil fuels. As an example, I started justifying to myself taking flights because we were running the pilot. That wasn’t good! I found the Sylvera analysis interesting because - obviously - they say that 70% of the offsets they examined did not achieve their intended effect. As a lawyer, that sounds like a massive misrepresentation problem and some class action lawsuits are incoming. Secondly - because all the questions about legitimacy focus on quality of a limited number of model assumptions for the future. But not on whether modeling precise deliverables like offsets is possible at all at the interface of complex human and environmental systems. It is my contention that offsets can’t accurately model their impact within these systems (eg Javons paradox is a potential issue for offsets never acknowledged in offset models) and the offsets as modeled reductions - sadly - will always be chimeric at worst and directional at best.