Take a look at the size of the recent COP26 climate march in Glasgow posted by Stuart Gibson on his twitter feed after Greta Thunberg criticized the focus on climate offsets as nothing more than corporate and state "greenwashing."
As Jess Shankleman and John Ainger point out in their Bloomberg article, “Offsets are a way for buyers to continue polluting while essentially paying someone else to adopt climate-friendly behaviors. But no global oversight or common standards exist, and an abundance of low-quality offsets appears to have little impact on global warming.”
Greta Thunberg tweeted, “The fossil fuel industry & banks are among the biggest climate villains. Now Shell, British Petroleum and Standard Chartered (bank) are here in Glasgow trying to scale up offsetting and give polluters a free pass to keep polluting. Their plan could trash the 1.5°C goal.”
After Greta and activists from Greenpeace and the Indigenous Environmental Network interrupted a panel on carbon offsets to protest greenwashing, Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator at ActionAid International told those gathered, “Carbon offsets mean climate sabotage. They aren’t just a tool to greenwash climate inaction and delay the transformation we need, they’re also going to drive devastating land grabs in the Global South.”
They are absolutely correct.
At COP26 our national leaders, polluting corporations, and the banks financing their projects demonstrated their continued failure to present any course corrections which can meaningfully impact our worsening climate emergency. The failure of COP26 is on them.
For more details read the Bloomberg article.
Photo credit: QUENTIN BRUNO/Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0