Before calculating my carbon footprint I honestly thought I had it in the bag. I never drive or take cabs. When a destination is too far to bike to, I take public transportation. I buy most of my food locally and swore off meat a while ago. Only rarely do I eat eggs, cheese, or chicken. Almost everything I buy is secondhand. I separate my trash and recycle all paper, plastic and glass. Any food scraps go into compost.

But once a year I leave Germany to visit my family in Texas. I usually take another short flight during the year as well.

Those roughly 40 hours I spend stuffed into economy class make up over three-quarters of my carbon footprint. Looking at my results on Foot Print Calculator, I see why Greta Thunberg travels by boat: she avoided the pollution of a fossil fuel-powered plane and prevented 2,200 pounds of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. The red area symbolizing my transport carbon is glaring, and depressing.

The enormous cost of flying is one big reason carbon offset programs took off about 20 years ago. These programs funnel carbon emissions-based donations from an individual or company into various carbon-reduction projects around the world. So a person taking a long-distance flight, for example, can buy a certificate that is equivalent to the cost of the carbon dioxide emitted during the trip. The money spent then goes to a project of her or his choosing, such as a renewable energy program or a soil management initiative.

Initially the programs were aimed at environmentally oriented consumers. More recently, businesses have gotten involved, which accounts for the uptick in using carbon offsets and the growing number of companies who say they are “carbon neutral.” The New York Times recently announced it will buy carbon offsets for its travel desk due to the high volume of flights its reporters take. Lyft and Etsy are purchasing offsets. By 2021, airlines that fly internationally will have to offset any extra emissions under a UN agreement (called the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, agreed on in 2018 in Montreal, Canada).

It’s easy to see why the offset model is so appealing –  it allows you to bargain with your own conscience. My carbon footprint clocks in at 6.8 metric tons, or around 14,900 pounds of carbon dioxide per year, which is between the average here in Germany (8.88 metric tons) and the average worldwide (4.35 metric tons). By comparison, Americans’ outsized appetite for meat and dairy, SUVs, air conditioning, and air travel results in an average carbon footprint of 14.95 metric tons per person, per year. We would all benefit if more of us tried to lighten our carbon load.

But do carbon offsets work? When you are buying offsets you are paying someone to cut their emissions so you don’t have to. Are carbon offset programs essentially a license to pollute?

Reduce what you can, offset what you cannot

My friend Alan McNulty, a sustainable food advocate in Berlin, started buying offsets after a job change made flying unavoidable. On the surface it seemed like the perfect solution. “A project in the United Kingdom meant that I would be flying once a month from Berlin,” he said. “Carbon offsetting is an attempt to at least compensate for actions not completely in line with my beliefs.” 

He admits, however, that he’s not entirely certain it’s a fair trade. The project he’s chosen supports cleaner cookstoves for women in less developed countries. “But can the projects be developed at the pace necessary to deal with the amount of emissions in the atmosphere?” he asks. In other words, how can a $15 donation neutralize a plane trip?

Herein lies the challenge with carbon offsets. In and of themselves they don’t work to reset your own carbon footprint, says Sarah Leugers, the communications director of Gold Standard, an organization that certifies offset projects. “Offsetting must go hand in hand with an ambitious internal reduction strategy,” she says.

Niklas Hagelberg of United Nations Environment echoed her warning in an article published this past June. “Carbon offset projects will never be able to curb the emissions growth, while reducing overall emissions,” he writes, “if coal power stations continue to be built and petrol cars continue to be bought, and our growing global population continues to consume as it does today.”

In short, carbon offsets can have tangible benefits if they direct money to effective projects, and are paired with changes you make in other parts of your life. But they can play a role in climate activism. Says Leugers: “The first priority should always be to reduce your own footprint before offsetting, but the reality is that not every individual or business can do that quickly.” 

Lightening my load

Alan and I run a local, organic food distribution hub together so we have plenty of time to talk about environmental concerns. Alan has donated his car, opting to take public transportation instead. He’s also cutting back on meat. 

When I retook the quiz pretending to be someone who eats animal products with every day, my carbon footprint jumped from 6.8 to 10.1 metric tons per year, and I went from needing 2.1 Earths, to 4.3.  If you’re a meat eater, cutting out a few days of meat a week is an offset by itself. 

The more difficult challenge for Alan, and for me, is easing off air travel. A variety of activities can be ‘neutralized’ with offsets, but flights are the most popular because they generate huge amounts of CO2. The carbon emissions of one seat on a roundtrip flight between San Francisco and New York amount to 1.6 tons, for instance. At the same time, there are 66 countries in the world where the average person uses less than 1.6 tons of carbon in one year.  

The no-fly movement, also known as flygskam, or  flight-shaming, started in Sweden and has spread to eight countries, including Germany. It’s also beginning to take hold in the United States, where one third of all global travel takes place. The goal is to persuade more people to give up flying, or at least drastically cut back on it. On a recent Washington, DC stop to promote his book, We are the Weather, author Jonathan Safraen Foer said he can’t cut out flying entirely but he has decided against vacations that involve air travel.  

I can cut back on some of my air travel, but I can’t give up the chance to see my family. So to offset the two metric tons of carbon I’ll be generating while speeding to Texas this holiday season, I’m donating $25 to Sustainable Travel International to support land rights for indigenous farming populations. Ensuring that the land remains with the farmers keeps it from being developed into industrial agricultural operations, or opened up to mining. Although I can’t fly anymore without feeling guilt, at least I know that I have the power to do something about it.

How to buy carbon offsets

Before buying my carbon offsets, I did my homework. The carbon offset industry isn’t well regulated and suffers from a major lack of transparency. Experts recommend you make sure any project you support has been reviewed by a third-party, clearly defines how the emission reduction works, and explains how it’s accounted for.

Organizations that audit programs for quality, include Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), the Gold Standard, the Climate Action Reserve, the American Carbon Registry and the Green-e Climate Standard. If your project has one of these seals it passes a variety of tests, including those of efficacy and appropriate use of funds. 

Another way to check the value of your project is to see if it lines up with the effective solutions to climate solutions that have been identified by Project Drawdown. It publishes a list of solutions, ranked by necessity.

Many carbon-offset programs tend to focus on the energy sector. Given that Project Drawdown highlights solutions involving food or agriculture twice in the top five most important steps we can take to mitigate climate change, this seems like a big oversight.

Following are four popular offset programs that include at least one agricultural project. 

Cool Effect uses an extremely simple sliding scale to price out carbon-emitting behavior. My 11-hour flight from Germany to Texas, for instance, requires me to offset one metric ton, costing me $14.70. Alan’s flight from Berlin to London would cost him $2.41. We could then contribute that money to any of 19 projects, six of which involve the food system, though they mostly have to do with cleaner-burning cookstoves. Each project includes the cost per metric ton that is required to support it. One example is Mirador Clean Cookstoves ($8.50 per metric ton), an organization working to build more efficient stoves in Honduras that use less wood. Stoves requiring a lot of wood contribute to deforestation and put CO2 into the atmosphere. They’re also bad for the health of the (mostly) women tending to them.

Terrapass allows you to offset one ton for $4.99, along with options to buy renewable energy credits and water restoration certificates. To use this provider, I would have to calculate the carbon my flights generate on a different website, and then decide how many certificates I would want to buy. The site offers the chance to invest in methane captured from landfills or the breakdown of animal waste to use as biofuel, clean energy from wind farms, and methane capture at abandoned coal mines.

TripZero is both a booking site and carbon calculator that can determine the impact of flights and hotel stays. Unlike airline websites that offer a similar service, TripZero is certified by the Verified Carbon Standard. My carbon cost for an upcoming trip to Marrakech, Morocco would include my flight (3,187 pounds of CO2) and hotel (279 pounds of CO2), and I could offset both at once, donating to projects such as a wind farm in Oregon, a reforestation project in Chile, and a cow manure processing plant in Pennsylvania. The downside to this program is that the user has to first book accommodations through the site. There is no option to just donate.

Sustainable Travel International has a carbon offset program under a larger umbrella organization that works in areas such as ocean conservation, forest biodiversity, and community-driven projects in developing countries. It offers a carbon footprint calculator on the website, and eight projects to contribute to, including conservation, reforestation, creating biofuel from animal manure, wind energy, water purification, and land ownership rights for indigenous farming populations. Two metric tons of CO2 costs approximately $25.00.

Amanda Coulson-Drasner is a News Fellow based in Berlin, Germany.

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