Airlines have been selling carbon offsets for years—take a flight and plant a tree. It didn’t cost much and it assuaged our guilty consciences. It’s old news, so Australian airline Qantas has come up with a new spin on the old offset with their Green tier: You get rewards for cleaning up the rest of your life, you know, that part that doesn’t involve airplanes.
Other activities that will get points include walking to work, installing solar panels, or contributing to efforts to save the Great Barrier Reef, notwithstanding that the Great Barrier Reef is being killed by climate change caused by carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, including those from Qantas jets. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce effuses about sustainability:
It is hard to know where to start with this, perhaps with George Monbiot in 2006 when carbon offsets were first offered by airlines. He wrote what could be a direct response to Joyce’s statement about offsets being a short term solution:
But Monbiot also makes a point about traditional carbon offsets: Trees take time to grow. He notes: “Almost all the carbon offset schemes take time to recoup the emissions we release today.”
The Qantas scheme is interesting because walking instead of driving actually does prevent carbon emissions now, as does installing solar panels when you have coal-fired electricity. If it was measured pound-for-pound of CO2, it would be a form of carbon budgeting, not dissimilar from what I tried to do in my recent book, “Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle.”
The trouble is that flights from Australia are long; Melbourne to Los Angeles is 7,921 miles or 12,778 kilometers, at 195 grams of carbon per kilometer, totaling 2,491 kilograms of CO2. One would have to walk 14,567 kilometers instead of driving to truly offset the carbon emissions of flying that one trip. That’s not likely to happen, and these offsets are really just performative.
Climate expert Ketan Joshi studied in Australia and we reached out for his thoughts on this. He noted in a tweet: “The broken and mad logic of offsetting - coupling every step forwards with a big step backward - has really become the default way of thinking for these companies. Creates a total disconnect from the actual problem. Intentionally, of course.”
Back in simpler times, when offsets were new, Monbiot noted that it sounded great. “Without requiring any social or political change, and at a tiny cost to the consumer, the problem of climate change is solved. Having handed over a few quid, we can all sleep easy again.”
But the problems of the emissions from flying are not so easily sloughed off. Aviation remains an almost intractable problem, and it is pretty hard to get to and from Australia without it. So let’s not pretend that feel-good personal offsets will make a difference. As Monbiot concluded so long ago: “You can now buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction. But you cannot buy the survival of the planet.”
