IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/33170.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Greens are Right to be Suspicious of Carbon Offsets

Author

Listed:
  • Geoffrey Heal

Abstract

I distinguish between reduction offsets and removal offsets, the former generated by a reduction in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions and the latter generated by the removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. I show that only removal offsets make any contribution to mitigating climate change. There is a simple intuitive explanation: a firm buys an offset to compensate for the fact that it is emitting greenhouse gases and plans to continue to do so. What should “compensate” mean in this context? That the purchase of the offset undoes the negative impact of the continuing emissions on the climate. This can only happen by the removal from the atmosphere of a quantity of greenhouse gases equal to that emitted by the purchaser of the offset. So an offset which compensates for the climatic impact of emissions has to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. I also review carbon offsets generated by forest management, as of all currently-traded offsets these are the closest to removal offsets.

Suggested Citation

  • Geoffrey Heal, 2024. "Greens are Right to be Suspicious of Carbon Offsets," NBER Working Papers 33170, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33170
    Note: EEE PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w33170.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • Q2 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Renewable Resources and Conservation
    • Q5 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33170. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.