what comes after carbon offsetting?
iāve been thinking a lot about the saga of carbon offsetting, and what comes next.
carbon offsets were pitched as promises to remove some amount of carbon from the atmosphere (or prevent some amount of emissions). you would buy them to offset your carbon footprint and the money would be used to fulfill the promised impact. sadly, many of these promises failed to deliver.
that wouldnāt be the end of the world, except that these offsets were used as cover by large corporations to avoid reducing their own emissions. by buying offsets, these companies reaped all the reputational rewards of ācarbon neutrality,ā without actually achieving carbon neutrality, since the offsets were faulty.
the climate community, realizing their unwitting role in this greenwashing, has since moved away from the idea of āoffsetsā. now you donāt buy āoffsetsā. you purchase ācarbon removalā. (sometimes they call it ādurableā carbon removal, so as to reassure you they are serious this time! -- but also, there is an increased emphasis on physically removing carbon from the air and burying it in the ground where it will stay for a long long time.)
under this new framework, instead of āoffsettingā, businesses are told to pay an āinternal carbon feeā (basically a tax on their emissions). this change in semantics represents a more explicit acknowledgement of risk -- your carbon fee is not guaranteed to offset your emissions -- and correspondingly comes with new guidance more focused on decarbonization than āneutralityā on the balance sheet.
whatever you make of these business shenanigans, these changes havenāt fully reached the consumer realm, whereĀ the largest consumer appĀ still sells itself as a footprint neutralizer. (what else would it be? aināt no one gonna brag about their internal carbon fees.)
indeed,Ā wrenĀ has been an interesting experiment. carbon offsets have never been much of a consumer product -- the vast majority of purchases are from governments and businesses -- but wren bundled purchases into a nice UI and subscription and accrued 30,000ish subscribers. whether that would have been possible without spending millions of VC-dollars on adsā¦ well, no comment.
as a consumer product, carbon offsetting (or removal) is a difficult sell. it runs contrary to what human beings want to be doing -- cool shit. people donāt want to payĀ other peopleĀ to do cool shit; they want to do the cool shitĀ themselves.
another problem is that thereās not that many offset options for consumers. you can either buy offsets from the formerly-disgraced āaccreditedā offsetting marketplaces, or else you can purchase carbon removal from one of a few different VC-backed companies. needless to say, these are not the most romantic optionsā¦
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so, whatās next?
donāt let the political and cultural trends get you down. there are some new ideas on the horizon that give me hope. i think weāll see three trends:
first, i think weāll see more indie projects. ai has made phd-level knowledge on almost any subject matter readily available to anyone. this makes small indie projects way more viable. and though ai is still terrible at any kind of novel or creative thinking -- thatās what we have human beings for.
second, i think weāll see a broader spectrum of āclimateā projects with less emphasis on carbon removal. what survives this era wonāt be a retread of past themes (re: carbon galore). instead, weāll see renewed interest in areas like nature restoration, overlooked causes like animal welfare, and causes tied to our current historical moment -- like data centers and AI.
third, i think weāll see more democratic funding models. instead of passive subscriptions where you give your money to someone and hope for the best, weāll see more active systems where people play an important role through voting or other kinds of participatory systems. mainly because they are just way more fun.
or at any rate, those are the ideas thatĀ iĀ am excited aboutā¦ what about you?