Choosing Carbon Offsets That Pass the Bullshit Test

There’s a word in the sustainability space that, when spoken, often feels like one should look to the left and right to make sure no one hears them say……offsets. Since John Oliver’s takedown (a skilled one, I might say) of the carbon offset industry in summer 2022, our field has collectively gathered one big proverbial rug to sweep offsets under in many ways. In the last few weeks, internal turmoil about offsets has publicly plagued the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), and so the conversation continues. (PS – It also continues on our podcast – find the companion episode to this blogpost on Table Stakes.)

I’m not going to argue two years later against John Oliver’s points. Smarter people with more information on the offset market have done that already. If you’re interested, read rebuttals from Verra, GreenBiz, SustainCERT, and others. What I will share is information about how Veerless approaches the conversation about offsets with our clients and internally. We recently became both Carbon Neutral Certified and Aclymate Climate Leader Certified. This means we’ve certified 100% of our 2023 emissions twice. Our footprint is small as we are a remote-only work environment. Our only significant footprint is business travel. That said, even with a small footprint, we followed a similar process we would advise any company to follow in choosing offset partners.

Download “The Sheet” on Offset Categories and Criteria

In our work with clients, we regularly identify topics which arise perpetually in our discussions. Veerlesss has created a repository for these recommendations and reviews on our website, a series of documents we call “The Sheet.” In this month’s Sheet we are tackling the basics in defining carbon offset projects and our four-pronged approach to identifying strong carbon offset projects for your company.

The approach outlined here is exactly the process we employed this year when choosing partners to offset our 2023 carbon footprint.

Veerless’ Choices in Offset Partners

While our footprint is miniscule compared to the corporations we partner with and the clients we serve, it was still important to our team to choose high quality, transparent, hyper-local projects with clear outcomes. We chose to invest in three different types of projects from three different providers. See if our choices pass the “bullshit test” we talked about in the criteria we outlined in The Sheet above.

Tradewater Refrigerant Destruction in Bowling Green, Ohio (U.S. Based Carbon Avoidance)

First, Tradewater is a fellow B Corp, which gave us immediate trust in their commitment to metrics, process, and transparency. Tradewater projects are focused on managing the collection and safe destruction of refrigerants. The refrigerants they collect and destroy are up to 10,200 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and otherwise would end up in landfill and leak into our atmosphere. The Tradewater offset project we chose focuses on refrigerants collected in Ohio, a state whose emissions are crucial to the biodiversity of Lake Erie and the entire Great Lakes Basin where a majority of our team resides. Tradewater projects have a long history of success all over the world. They’ve had 77 projects credited by ACR, 2 credited by Verra and 59 projects credited by the California Air Resources Board. They’ve had permanent impact equal to 7.5 million tons of CO2 and have invested more than $45 million in communities around the world since their inception.

Learn more on Tradewater’s website and in the ACR Registry documents related to project ACR875.

UPM Blandin Improved Forest Management in Grand Rapids, Minnesota (U.S. Based Carbon Removal)

Learn more in this video from The Nature Conservancy

The truth about many heavy industries and the corporations in those industries is that they must grapple with the bad environmental decisions that were made across their history. I saw this first-hand when I worked in the steel industry. So it was important to me when choosing offsets to consider projects involving historically environmentally unfriendly industries. In the case of UPM Blandin, that industry is logging. UPM is a world leader in paper production and their Blandin mill located in Grand Rapids, MN has been at work since 1901. UPM has taken an industry leading approach called Smart Forestry℠ that applies a life cycle concept to forestry on its more than 187,000 acres of forest in Minnesota. Their approach to forestry ensures the regeneration of healthy forests and ultimately the long-term storage of carbon. We also recognized in our choice of this offset the strong partnership UPM Blandin developed with world-renowned nature-focused nonprofit The Nature Conservancy.

Learn more on UPM Blandin’s website and in the ACR Registry documents related to project ACR212.

Prairie Conservation at the Lightning Creek Ranch in Eastern Oregon (U.S. Based Carbon Storage)

I grew up in rural North Dakota, the granddaughter of two farmers. I’ve watched closely the work organizations like The Nature Conservancy have done in North Dakota for years to determine the role grasslands have to play in climate change strategies. In 2013, The Nature Conservancy’s research team determined that protecting 10% of the remaining unprotected grasslands in North and South Dakota could avoid 11.7 million tons of CO2e emissions over 20 years. That’s like taking 2.5 million passenger cars off the road for a year. Unfortunately, we struggled to find offsets in North and South Dakota that met the criteria of Carbon Neutral Certification or Aclymate, but we decided grasslands in general were important enough we wanted to find a top-notch project to round out our 2023 offsets. The project we chose is in Eastern Oregon, a landscape my husband and I drove through on a recent trip and fell in love with immediately. The project protects 12,225 acres of grassland from conversion to cropland, keeping 55,000 tons of carbon in the soil.