CARBON OFFSETTING AND GREEN WASHING – ENVIRONMENT
News: Explained|
Why the ‘world’s first carbon-neutral airline’ is facing a lawsuit
What's in the news?
● Delta in 2020 marketed
itself as the “world’s first carbon-neutral airline”,
investing $1 billion to work on reducing fuel usage and investing in carbon
removal techniques.
● The
carbon claims responded to a growing keenness among people like Berrin who
wanted to engage in ecologically conscious air travel, and by extension,
participate in a global transition away from carbon emissions.
Key takeaways:
● The
veracity of these claims is now under scrutiny: on May 30, Berrin filed a
lawsuit — the first of its kind against a U.S. airline’s climate claims —
arguing Delta Air Line’s assertions were bogus, misleading and false.
What's the issue?
● The
‘green airline’ tag is a contested commodity, as flyers and companies alike are
realizing that flying is a significant contributor to carbon pollution
(accounting for more than 2% of all greenhouse-gas emissions).
● Aviation emissions could
grow by 300-700% by 2050, per estimates.
Technique of Carbon Offsetting:
● Delta
relied on “carbon offsetting”, shorthand for a slew of ways companies can reduce or remove carbon
emissions from the environment.
● Activities
like planting trees, shifting to cleaner fuel, funding carbon capture
techniques in theory balance out a company’s carbon emissions.
● Carbon
offsets work like a game of Monopoly, except instead of money, companies deal
in carbon emissions.
Delta and Carbon Offsetting:
● A
single round trip from Mumbai to L.A. generates 4.8tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to
charging 6,00,000 smartphones), but the claim is that the carbon pollution from
this trip can be absorbed by trees or carbon vacuums that airlines like Delta
supported.
● All
the customer has to do is pay extra to participate in “green flying”.
Carbon credits:
● A company gets “carbon credits”
for investment in offset projects, tokens which
represent an amount of carbon dioxide which would have been funneled out of the
atmosphere due to these initiatives.
● Each credit is equal to a
metric ton of CO2, which would have caused global warming.
● These
credits allow companies to continue emitting carbon in one place (say, airplane
travel), with the promise their offsets are reducing emissions elsewhere (in
distant rainforests).
● The
voluntary carbon-offset market is expected to grow from $2 billion in 2020 to
around $250 billion by 2050, per a 2023 report by Morgan Stanley.
REDD+:
● The
United Nations in 2008 formalized
this idea by setting up the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation (REDD+), believing that the incentives
from offsetting will help nations achieve climate goals.
Greenwashing:
● Greenwashing
is the practice in which firms and governments mark all kinds of activities as climate-friendly, as something that
would lead to emissions reduction, or avoidance of emissions.
● Many
of these claims are unverifiable,
misleading, or dubious.