Who Will Help Design Carbon Offset Programs? Why, Shell, BP & Easyjet - Why Do You Ask?
Many of the world’s most polluting companies are being handed a “get out of jail free” card by being invited to shape a scaled-up offsetting market, campaigners claim. The Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets is due to publish its “roadmap for implementation” on Wednesday, four months after it was launched by former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who is now a UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.
Carney’s group wants to hugely scale up the existing market, making it “large, transparent, verifiable and robust”. This, it claims, will help private corporations meet the UK’s net zero target by 2050, in line with Paris Agreement targets to limit the worst impacts of climate change by restricting global warming to 1.5C or “well below” 2C. But critics have questioned whether the taskforce’s membership – which includes oil majors, banks and airlines – is best placed to shape the future of that market, given their problematic histories of delivering carbon offsetting projects.
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A number of green NGOs are involved in funding and overseeing the taskforce, but this hasn’t stopped it being accused of corporate capture, with companies with mixed records on offsetting, including oil majors such as Shell, BP and Total, to airlines like Easyjet and Etihad, and banking groups Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, BlackRock and UBS, having a strong presence in the group.
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Like Shell, BP has developed its own offset programme, “Target Neutral”, allowing customers to offset emissions through funding forest management in Zambia and more efficient cookstoves in India. The initiative is also used to offset harmful greenhouse gases from Air BP, which claims to be the first aviation fuel provider to have achieved carbon neutral operations globally. Oil majors have also been burnishing their climate credentials on a global stage. During COP25, the UN’s 2018 climate summit in Madrid, both BP and Shell were introduced as founding members of the new International Emissions Trading Association (IETA)’s advisory panel for its Markets for Natural Climate Solutions. Dozens of environmental and Indigenous activists walked out in protest over the involvement of oil companies and fears the scheme would discourage companies from making substantial emissions cuts.
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https://www.desmog.co.uk/2021/01/22/shell-bp-and-easyjet-big-polluters-designing-rules-voluntary-carbon-offsets