Today I’m debuting the first brand new session in Net Zero Business Academy since it was launched as Green Academy over a decade ago. Out went the ethics session, which I liked but few were interested in, and in came “Putting the ‘Net’ in Net Zero, a sensible approach to Offsetting”. I know quite a bit about offsetting, having been on the board of a regional scheme 20 years ago, but to be able to give a comprehensive overview, I had to do quite a bit of digging in the data mines and it was surprisingly difficult to pin certain things down.

Is the offsetting (aka voluntary carbon credit market) currently $2bn pa or $11bn? Why do credits vary from less than $1 up to $500? How does enhanced rock weathering work? Why are so many offsetting projects criticised as ineffective or even a scam?

The last question is one which was very hard to get an objective view on. Much of the controversy centres on “avoided deforestation” projects where the carbon benefits are very hard to prove. How do you know the forest is under threat and to what degree? Is ensuring the preservation of that forest a worthwhile cause no matter what? When I had Brendan May on the podcast, he was adamant that the funding from offsets was doing good and vital work protecting forests. Various environmental campaigners and journalists would disagree.

In the NZBA session, I make the point that while scrutiny of the robustness of any offsetting scheme is vital to keep out the genuine scammers, the implications of ‘do nothing’ have to be fed into the equation. In Mark Lynas’s excellent book The God Species, he argues that the original attacks on offsetting as intrinsically immoral did nothing to accelerate decarbonisation by the organisations and people who were interested in offsetting but did cut vital funding to a range of environmental projects. Lose-lose.

I’m pretty convinced that we can, should and must get offsetting to work. Offsets work like a voluntary carbon tax on a business, ring fenced for environmental projects. They also provide a degree of flexibility in the economy to allow alternative routes to decarbonisation when organisations hit serious barriers. As I say in my review of the first year of the podcast, many great projects are being funded by offsets. The consequence of an effective ban on offsetting might be organisations abandoning Net Zero targets as ‘too difficult’. Who gains from that?

Anyway, looking forward to delivering this inaugural Offsetting webinar this afternoon, but maybe with a little trepidation as the issues are multidimensional and complicated.