Since delta is paying to convert a coal plant to a solar plant, carbon offsets create perverse incentives like allowing you to “sell” or hold hostage something you were going to do anyway, keep inefficient things around so you can sell offsets lager, or start off doing something inefficient or bad so someone can pay you to stop.
For example, as a fisherman it might be cheaper for me to buy some old, shitty, super-polluting boats, run them around for a bit generating huge amounts of emissions, and then go shopping for offsets. With the offsets I buy nicer boats that don’t pollute as much. But without the offsets I might have either not been fishing at all or gone straight for the nicer boats.
Basically, carbon offsets in theory allocate carbon savings where they are most effective financially, but in practice create structural inefficiencies (incentivized to start polluting to fix it). Also, they are prone to double counting. If I open a wind farm partially funded by carbon offsets, if I claim that the farm is removing as much CO2 as it actually saves, I’m double counting along with whoever paid for the offsets to be “carbon neutral” when there is indeed still a net amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere
For example, as a fisherman it might be cheaper for me to buy some old, shitty, super-polluting boats, run them around for a bit generating huge amounts of emissions, and then go shopping for offsets. With the offsets I buy nicer boats that don’t pollute as much. But without the offsets I might have either not been fishing at all or gone straight for the nicer boats.
Basically, carbon offsets in theory allocate carbon savings where they are most effective financially, but in practice create structural inefficiencies (incentivized to start polluting to fix it). Also, they are prone to double counting. If I open a wind farm partially funded by carbon offsets, if I claim that the farm is removing as much CO2 as it actually saves, I’m double counting along with whoever paid for the offsets to be “carbon neutral” when there is indeed still a net amount of carbon being put in the atmosphere