These days, many purchases, from an airplane ticket to bottled water, come with the promise that buying it will result in zero net carbon. Phew. No need to feel bad about that trip to Hawaii anymore, or that you left your water bottle at home.
Corporations often offer consumers these “carbon offsets” when they buy their products. This industry is massive, estimated to be worth nearly $1 trillion USD in 2022, and would grow to $2 trillion by 2030.
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“Carbon offsets” are when you can make up for the carbon impacts of one product, by paying another company to negate your impact. This could be by planting trees, building electric vehicles, or carbon capture and storage technology.
Cheating
It’s not just that most carbon offsets don’t work, as we show in our book, The Sustainability Class: How to Take Back Our Future from Lifestyle Environmentalists. It’s more than that. This scheme is also morally questionable, and illustrates why many climate solutions on offer feel wrong.
To understand why, meet Cheat Neutral, a start up claiming to offset cheating in relationships. By just investing in their company, you can cheat as much as you’d like, but pay someone else to be faithful to their partner. This would then offset your cheating.
In an interview for the BBC, the budding entrepreneurs tried to pitch their business plan. “What we’re trying to do is say that cheating isn’t something you have to feel bad about anymore; it’s just something you have to neutralize or offset. Just make sure the total amount of cheating doesn’t go up.”
It turns out that this business idea was an elaborate stunt to illustrate the immoral logic behind carbon offsets. In the offsetting industry, units of carbon released or sequestered are treated like exchangeable tokens in the casino, and like those tokens, they can be traded for money. It doesn’t matter if you lose, as long as you buy it back.
What’s truly remarkable is that these companies have gotten away with convincing us that carbon offsetting is the ethical thing to do, when most people immediately see that offsets for cheating are immoral.
Abusive
As one perturbed passerby said when informed about Cheat Neutral: “That’s not balancing anything. That’s just doing one thing, and then doing something else that’s totally different. I don’t see the link, except in our minds.”
Carbon offsets are designed to soothe a desire for rough-and-ready solutions to complex problems. Offsets can be purchased and procured at will. They just require money, and there’s plenty of that for the wealthy.
Green gaslighting is about being able to displace, violate, or abuse others under the guise of being sustainable and progressive—all while questioning the sanity of those abused.
Your purchase is couched in a sentiment of care but ends up being deceitful when it’s used to cover your tracks and, like the service Cheat Neutral offers, move on as though nothing ever happened.
You might be tempted to commend those who buy offsets, whether of the carbon or cheating variety. At the very least, they are acknowledging there is a problem with their behavior, that their actions have a negative impact. But when you think about it, is that really any better than doing nothing at all?
This has all the hallmarks of an abusive relationship: confessing to everything you did wrong, apologising, buying something nice to show you care, and then continuing the very behavior that you apologised for.
Exploit
The commonality between carbon offsetting and cheating offsets is that they leverage our feeling that something is wrong, offer a quick solution, and end up hiding the root of the problem, pretending it doesn’t exist.
If we're honest, many 'greening' strategies are really just gaslighting. Gaslighting is when one person makes another question their own reality.
The gaslighter does this by coming up with a 'rational' explanation for a problem, often blaming the victim harmed by the problem, and then taking the credit for having solved the problem—completely obscuring the fact that they were the cause of the problem in the first place. Often all of that happens in rapid succession, so fast that you don’t even realise you’ve been gaslit.
Another particularly astounding example of green gaslighting comes from a pair of twenty-three-year-old sophomores from Texas A&M University, Brent Whitehead and Matt Lohstroh, who made $4 million in 2021 by buying a shipping container full of servers and then employing them to mine Bitcoin using power from gas flares generated by offshore oil and gas fields.
When oil is drilled, natural gas often escapes as well. That can be captured, but usually producers just burn it off, releasing CO2 in the process. Whitehead and Lohstroh figured they could “solve” the problem by saving that gas from being burned only and using it to generate profit instead, powering Bitcoin mining servers packed into containers.
Sure, it’s efficient—but it doesn’t actually “solve” any problem. All it does is more efficiently exploit oil and gas reserves. The public is both literally and figuratively gaslit. The fact that oil drilling should have stopped ten years ago, given our climate emergency, doesn’t figure at all in the logic.
Interventions
Similarly, corporate public relations campaigns have persuaded us that we can leave fossil fuel companies in charge of greening themselves and the economy, that they are taking the lead in the sustainable transition.
You’re made to feel like an idiot by corporate oligarchs and the pundits who parrot them, ridiculed with a thousand and one names from 'socialist' to 'Luddite', or mocked as just plain backward because you doubt that corporate elites might not address the problems they have generated.
This despite every bit of evidence suggesting that not only have their efforts repeatedly failed, but their interventions have reinforced the problems we find ourselves in.
Contaminated
Green gaslighting also repackages the violence of colonisation as morally progressive and 'eco-friendly'.
When Israel was declared a state in May 1948, native trees like oaks, carobs, and hawthorns as well as agricultural crops like olives, figs, and almonds were destroyed during the forced removal of the residents of five hundred villages and towns of historical Palestine.
In place of this unique biodiversity, new settlers planted monocultures of European pine trees. These monocultures made soils more acidic, reduced undergrowth, and enhanced the likelihood of fires, which have further devastated regional ecologies.
This is all justified with the slogan “let the desert bloom". The idea is that local Palestinians have mismanaged the desert and only settlers can make it green.
Over decades, Israel has deprived Palestinians of a livable environment through total ecological destruction. Palestinians in Gaza have long struggled to access clean water, with 96 percent of the territory’s freshwater resources contaminated.
Bombardment
The situation became exponentially worse after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the Israeli Defense Forces’ subsequent assault on Gaza.
Satellite imagery shows the destruction of almost 50 percent of farmland and tree cover, including food-growing olive groves and orchards, exacerbating an imposed famine against Palestinians in Gaza.
Soils have been drained of their life-sustaining potential through the destruction of trees, continuous carpet bombing, aerial spraying of chemical herbicides, use of chemical warfare, and the release of hazardous materials, including heavy metals.
Meanwhile, Palestinians are arrested, interrogated, tortured, injured, and murdered merely for harvesting herbs, for obtaining firewood from the remaining trees for basic survival, for crossing into conservation areas that were their cattle grazing grounds, or for practicing livelihoods that made the land fertile and lush.
Yet, while a Palestinian’s per capita carbon emissions are about 0.8 tons per year, Israelis emit about twelve times that amount, at just under 10 tons per year per capita.
Despite having burned the equivalent of 150,000 tons of coal within just the first sixty days of its unprecedented bombardment of Gaza— surpassing the annual emissions of whole countries like Belize— Israel still shows up to United Nations conferences touting its action on climate change.
Holier-than-thou
Whether we are talking about green war crimes or absurd climate solutions like mining bitcoin off gas flares, green gaslighting helps perpetrators of ecological degradation take the green credit while they make the victims appear to be the culprits.
It’s far more insidious than greenwashing—where one can polish one’s reputation with a few potted plants or a solar panel or two. Green gaslighting is about being able to displace, violate, or abuse others under the guise of being sustainable and progressive—all while questioning the sanity of those abused.
Those who’ve had to live through some of the worst kinds of abuse, and now are faced with the holier-than-thou attitude of their abusers, are very likely to question their own sense of reality.
Green gaslighting is a kind of psychological torture. That's why it is so effective in justifying the “sustainability” of the status quo. Green gaslighters are doing nothing, or even making things worse, while claiming they are the heroes of the day.
These Authors
Vijay Kolinjivadi is an assistant professor at the School for Community and Public Affairs at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He is also a co-editor of the website Uneven Earth.
Aaron Vansintjan is the founder and co-editor of Uneven Earth and co-author of The Future Is Degrowth. He has been published in The Guardian, Truthout, openDemocracy, and The Ecologist.
The Sustainability Class: How to Take Back Our Future from Lifestyle Environmentalists is published by The New Press and will be available today, Tuesday, 10 December 10, 2024.