Joe Romm, of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, published a 50-page whitepaper arguing that carbon credits are “unscalable, unjust and unfixable.” In an interview, he said even the “Decarbon Ohio” marketing points to “magical thinking” – investing in renewable energy somewhere else doesn’t remove any carbon from the atmosphere in Ohio. He said the proposal is just a form of “greenwashing” – feigning environmental interest for public-relations purposes without accomplishing much of substance.
“The program that has been proposed by Dominion is basically one to deceive the public. I don’t know how else to put it,” he said. “The serious people about climate change are pretty rapidly moving away from using carbon offsets for making claims about carbon neutrality.”
The PUCO will rule on Dominion’s request in the coming months. But other Ohio players are in the ballpark. NiSource, via its subsidiary Columbia Gas, also recently asked the PUCO to launch an offset program, but it later dropped the idea. Duke Energy allows customers to purchase a “GoGreen rider,” charging them $1 per month for the purchase of “renewable energy certificates”— buying renewable generation elsewhere to “match” the fossil fuel-derived energy used at home.
“When you purchase RECs, you can feel good knowing that you are supporting renewable generation,” Duke says on its site.
The companies’ interest marks a shifting position from the industry in response to what Dominion called a “growing interest among customers … to reduce the carbon footprint associated with their natural gas service.”
Upon combustion, natural gas emits less carbon into the atmosphere than coal or oil. However, its main component is methane, which produces a much stronger greenhouse gas effect than carbon. Gas also tends to leak from pipelines or blown out wells, which cuts into its relative emission reductions. The scientific arm of the United Nations has grown increasingly adamant that global governments must get away from fossil fuels and decarbonize their grids in earnest to temper an increasingly warming planet.
Regardless, Dominion and others have championed messaging around concepts like the use of “sustainable” natural gas. Ohio now legally recognizes natural gas as “green energy.”
Some purported carbon offsets are overvalued, according to Rob Kelter, an attorney with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.
“The best carbon offset program is to reduce people’s usage of natural gas. Period,” he said. “I’m very skeptical of the true value of carbon offset programs, and I worry they delay the necessary hard decisions and actions that need to take place for us to really reduce carbon emissions.”
Continuing to build more fossil fuel infrastructure with a 30- to 50-year return on investment instead of pivoting toward renewable sources, he said, will likely leave customers paying for vestigial pipelines and gas plants when an inevitable shift to renewables sets in.
A Sierra Club spokesman declined to address Dominion’s proposal specifically. However, the organization has urged federal regulators to crack down on “deceptive claims and omissions” companies use to claim their climate friendliness, often predicated on flimsy purported offsets.
Attorneys with the Sierra Club wrote to the Federal Trade Commission that most offsets don’t actually remove carbon from the atmosphere. Rather, they claim to avoid future emissions or to temporarily store the element in “carbon sinks” like forests or soils.
“Temporary carbon storage is a problem because unless there is a credible commitment to maintain those carbon stocks for centuries to millennia, there is a significant risk of a re-release of carbon to the atmosphere, negating many of the climate benefits these offsets claim,” the organization wrote.
Romm, from Penn, said claims of carbon neutrality that rely on carbon offsets are positioning companies for a flood of false advertising lawsuits. Investigations in media outlets like The Guardian and ProPublica have raised questions of fraudulent claims from the companies selling the credits, as have researchers who examined the question.
Some companies have began to distance themselves from the offsets. The CEO of United Airlines said that the “majority of them are fraud” and the offsets often claim credit for trees that would have been planted or cut down anyways. Major brands like Nestle and Gucci have stepped away from claims of carbon neutrality. Swiss regulators found in June that FIFA, the international governing body for soccer, made false and misleading statements about reduced environmental impact of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, Reuters reports. And Delta was recently hit with a class action lawsuit in May in connection with its claim of being the “first carbon-neutral airline,” per the Associated Press.
The PUCO’s decision arrives in a context of political friendliness to the gas and utility industries and hostility to renewables. Last year, Republican lawmakers passed a bill that both cleared the legal roadblocks to drilling for gas under state parks, while simultaneously legally defining natural gas as a “green energy.” Ex-House Speaker Larry Householder was sentenced this year to 20 years in prison for taking a massive bribe from Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. in exchange for legislation that bailed out coal and nuclear plants in Ohio. And FirstEnergy admitted in 2021 to bribing not only Householder, but former PUCO chairman Sam Randazzo (who has not been charged with a crime).
Conversely, Ohio has some of the most stringent requirements for the “setback” distance between wind turbines and property lines; it has the weakest renewable energy standards of about 30 states with such a program; and lawmakers recently gave county officials a newfound veto power over renewable energy projects that doesn’t exist for coal, gas or oil projects.
An earlier version of this article said Joe Romm works at Pennsylvania State University. He works at the University of Pennsylvania.
Jake Zuckerman covers state politics and policy for Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
