Why climate change mitigation is so complicated and carbon offsets aren’t enough

Climate change is complicated, but in our new video and blog series we try to answer the most important questions in an easy-to-understand way. To do that, we asked our CTO and Co-founder, Daniel, to help. From this first installment of the series, you can learn why we haven’t solved climate change (yet), why carbon capture isn’t enough, and why planting trees won’t solve every issue.

Why haven't we solved climate change yet?

First of all, the climate is very complicated. We also live in a highly developed society, where we like to quantify everything before taking action. Reaching scientific consensus on certain things can be challenging, which was definitely the case with climate change. Agreeing upon exact figures took time. Now that we have an agreement, we have to understand the effects of our proposed solutions. That's another very complicated topic - because in our highly developed society, the economy operates on very thin margins. People’s jobs depend on what we do, and agreeing upon how to progress is hard.

What is carbon neutral, and what is net zero?

This question is confusing - and this confusion can benefit companies that don't do enough to mitigate their footprints. Carbon neutral is a vague term, and it essentially means that a company can continue business as usual and purchase offsets - in many cases questionable offsets - to theoretically compensate for their emissions. Net zero is a much more scientific term, and it places an onus on people to put all their efforts into actually reducing their emissions and only use carbon removal for emissions that cannot be reduced.

Is carbon capture enough to stop climate change?

It is definitely not enough. The most important thing we must do is reduce emissions because we already have too much CO2 in the atmosphere, and we still emit greenhouse gases every day. Some emissions cannot be abated — so, even if we cut all possible emissions, we would still have to use carbon capture technologies to combat climate change.

Can I really offset my carbon footprint?

Potentially yes, but it requires a lot of scrutiny of the actual offset measures. There are a lot of questionable solutions out there today, like afforestation projects which often cease to be monitored after five years. Nature-based solutions, in general, can be very problematic and are coming under fire in recent years. The good news is more responsible intermediaries are coming online to do the vetting for you.

Can't we just plant more trees to counter CO2 emissions?

To understand the problems with this idea, we have to think about how CO2 ended up in the atmosphere in the first place. Most of it was drawn down in the Carboniferous era when there were elevated levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. This abundance allowed for a huge growth spurt of biomass. In the meantime, there was a lack of microbes that could have gobbled up fallen trees. This lack of microbes meant that CO2 captured by those trees was never released.

During this era, flora could grow unperturbed, then fall over, and get covered geologically for around 60 million years. This biomass formed the fossil reservoirs of carbon which we then tapped into to fire our industrial revolution and societal progress to date. We're talking about millions of generations of trees — so at no given time will we have enough land mass to grow enough trees to capture all the CO2 we have released in the last hundred years. All this, of course, doesn't mean that afforestation and reforestation, in particular, are not essential to combat climate change. It’s just not the be-all, end-all solution.

Want to wrap your head around more climate issues?

Make sure to watch our video on YouTube, where Daniel shared even more nitty gritty details on these topics.

You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel, where this series is going online first — or visit our blog in the future where more and more content is going to be published very soon.