Offsetting Your Environmental Sins: The Commodification of Eco-guilt

Carbon offsets driven by the green economy narrative depoliticise the climate crisis and detract from the much-needed fossil fuel phase out, instead shifting responsibility to individual consumers.

No matter how sustainable we try to be, almost everything we do has environmental impacts. Whether it is small everyday things like buying groceries, watching TV, toasting your bread or bigger things like travelling, odds are there will be carbon emissions involved. In fact, I recently realised that even just sending a text message or email leads to carbon emissions. By merely being alive, we contribute to climate change.

At some point, I was starting to feel guilty about almost everything I did. This feeling of eco-guilt seeped through into my everyday life, especially when it came to larger things like buying clothes. While I mostly buy clothes second-hand and on a strictly “need” basis (e.g. work clothes, replacement of broken/worn-out clothes), whenever I did purchase something, I felt like I was betraying the environment for materialistic reasons.

People experience eco-guilt when their actions, or inactions, don’t meet societal or personal environmental norms.

In a form of moral licensing, I tried to engage in corrective actions to feel better about my impacts and soothe my moral dissonance. Inspired by the increasingly popular phenomenon of offsetting your carbon emissions for anything from flights, to diapers, to weddings, to funerals, I decided to start compensating for my carbon emissions from clothing purchases.

Originally, offset schemes were developed by specific offsetting providers. Over the years these providers have successfully created a discourse where to be truly environmentally friendly, you should offset your emissions and be “net-zero”. Instilling a sense of guilt in consumers while at the same time offering them a way to address that guilt through buying offsets, the providers turned people’s moral dissonance into business opportunities for themselves.

A discourse is a coherent story about the world and the relations in it. To put it simply: it is how reality is perceived, framed and communicated. Discourses can be set by and provide power to actors as narrowing the variety of possible interpretations normalises certain ways of thinking while marginalising others.

I must say, their idea of buying off your bad conscience works. For the past two years, I have been using a self-made simplified carbon compensation scheme. While compensating is naturally not as efficient in fighting climate change as reducing consumption-based emissions altogether, it makes me feel better that at least I am trying to ‘mitigate’ the impact of my emissions. Exactly as the offsetting providers intended. 

Feeling vulnerable showing you my clothing purchases for this year haha, but hereby my clothing compensation scheme. For every piece of clothing that I buy, I offset the value of 5, 7.5, or 10% of the purchase price (second-hand, sustainable first-hand, or fast fashion/normal brand first-hand respectively). These percentages are not based on any specific calculations and are derived simply from what I felt was the right amount. Might add a column for transport emissions too next year.

Similarly to other socially good deeds like volunteering or donating to charity, offsetting carbon emissions namely gives people a “warm glow”. This glow has long been recognised and capitalised on by fundraisers but has now also been skilfully employed by offset providers through bringing eco-guilt into the economy as a commodity.

Commodification is the introduction of products previously outside of the capitalist system into the free market where they can be exchanged against other commodities. Such marketisation is a key feature of the neoliberalism ideology which is based on the notion of free market capitalism.

The neoliberalisation of eco-guilt created a market that paints the picture of a world in crisis which can be saved by small offsetting contributions. In reality, however, this new market is simply a new way for companies to pursue profits and reach further capital accumulation, this time in the name of the environment. This is very clearly the product of the green economy narrative.

The green economy narrative relies on neoliberal market mechanisms to allow for cost-efficient approaches to save capitalism from the ecological damages it created itself. What it neglects to do, however, is critically reflect on and address the system’s inherent unsustainable nature. Ultimately, the green economy discourse and is thus not about sustaining the environment, but about sustaining the current neoliberal capitalist hegemony.

One prominent concept in green economy is the apolitical “economy of repair”. The ‘repair mode’ believes that unsustainable behaviour in one place can be fixed by sustainable practices in another, a spatial ‘fix’. According to this concept, making investments in the right technologies (e.g. carbon offsetting) will solve the environmental crisis.

A spatial fix sees geographical expansion and development as the solution to the crisis of over-accumulation of capital.

Roughly speaking, in my case this would mean that if I offset my clothes related carbon emissions, I have successfully addressed my contribution to global warming. This is obviously completely misleading, because what my investment really does is simply choose the cheaper and faster offsetting option rather than the complex and expensive option of an energy transition.

Besides the fact that this can lead to moral hazard as people see offsetting as an excuse to consume more, commodifying eco-guilt and adopting the economy of repair lens also completely depoliticises environmental issues It blindly focusses on technological processes and spatial fixes while attributing the climate crisis to individual emissions and neglecting to take into account wider the political and societal structures at play. As a result, it does not properly address the root cause of carbon emissions.

Depoliticisation refers to making topics abstract and taking them out of the political realm, looking at the direct links of a phenomenon rather than acknowledging the political, social and economic relations that influence it.

Shifting the responsibility of offsetting carbon emissions to the individual consumer, the repair mode diverts attention away from the rapid fossil fuel phase out that is needed to fight climate change. Rather than challenging the fossil fuel driven growth hegemony, the economy of repair and green growth narrative thrives on the ‘business as usual’ attitude and empowers the exact ideological mechanisms that got us into the climate crisis in the first place.

Moving beyond this narrow-focused repair mode requires to firstly reconceptualise ‘repair’ as not only a technological process but also a social and political process. This starts with a critical reflection of the green economy narrative. Both in how it depoliticises climate change and how it reproduces the self-destructive tendencies of the neoliberal capitalist hegemony.

Putting the spotlight on emission reduction rather than offsetting will help repoliticise the climate crisis by shifting the responsibility back from the individual consumer to the polluting corporations. In doing so, helping us to shy away from the cost-effective technological and spatial fix of offsetting and instead focus on the most impactful climate action: phasing out carbon emissions.

Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that offsetting is a crime and that we should stop offsetting altogether. It’s totally fine to adopt a “Reduce what you can, offset what you can’t” mindset. Personally, I will continue compensating my clothes because it still helps the environment and makes me feel better.

All I am saying is that we should hold companies accountable for their emissions, rather than blindly being fooled into feeling bad about our behaviour such that we voluntarily take over their responsibility.

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Hellooo,

This blog post was an assignment for my Political Ecology course. We had to take an issue from our everyday life and reflect on how PE concepts and tools can assist. in framing and investigating this issue and its political-ecological character.

In this course, we’ve discussed carbon offsetting quite a bit, mostly in the context of green land grabbing/green colonialism. The global north going to the global south to put up carbon offsetting projects can be extremely problematic as it is yet another way in which we enforce our worldview, and our (environmental/economic) priorities upon them to maintain our way of life - oftentimes neglecting the local population’s wants and needs, directly altering and dictating how they should live (very simplified explanation).

I find the element of green colonialism extremely important and interesting to research, but as this post needed to be about my everyday life, I decided to focus on the other side of carbon offsetting for this assignment. How did carbon offsetting become so big, how does it influence individuals in the global north, who is benefiting from it? Nevertheless, I wanted to briefly mention the green colonial side of it, just to maybe get you thinking about the further implications of carbon offsetting as well.

Thanks for reading!!