Thread by @TEGNicholas

Regardless of your opinion on Carbon Offsets, companies will want to use them.

So activists pressuring companies need to understand the different types of offsets!

My friend @EliMLarson was part of a team that created a set of Offsetting Principles to help you understand.

As he (and the other academics at Oxford who worked on this) argues then only offsets with certain, very stringent conditions can be relied upon to reduce future warming.

Very few currently available offsets are geologically-permanent, for example.

But offsets which do meet those standards are plausible, and some companies will definitely try to buy lots of them.

(see @BCG 's recent net-zero pledge - a company rich enough to buy the real deal assuming they will buy A LOT of offsets)

So one way in which these principles (and the report explaining them) are helpful is in telling the difference between total greenwash and genuine commitment.

Offsets have a bad name for a good reason: A large number of current market offsets (even those rated as "Gold-standard") would fail to meet even the least stringent of these Oxford Principles. (e.g. because they aren't additional, permanent or they involve double-counting.)

But after that it's not a simple pass/fail, and their taxonomy helps to explain the differences

Examples of how this makes distinguishing offsets clearer:

1) If I fly, but then pay someone to switch their boiler out for an electric one, I have bought an Emissions Reduction Offset.

2) If I fly, but then pay someone to suck carbon out of the air with DACCS, I have bought a Carbon Removal Offset.

3) If I choose not to fly, that is Emissions Reductions, but not an Offset.

4) If a brewing corp makes all parts of their business zero-carbon through electrification etc. Then on top of that (which is Emission Reductions) they also try to grow the crops for their beer in some way that absorbs CO2 from the air, that is Carbon Removal but not an Offset.

I personally think ideally offsetting would only be used for really important and irreplaceable activities (e.g. emissions from medical/scientific aircraft), and be geologically sequestered.

But to demand a company do it differently you should know what you're asking for.

/🧵

(This should have said "I think offsetting SHOULD only be used for X", not I think offsetting "WOULD only be used for X" - I very much think the offsetting market will grow massively even when I would much rather groups just directly avoided those emissions instead.)