What if you could pay someone else to cancel out your carbon emissions? As countries, organizations, and even individuals around the world commit to lowering their impact on the climate, many have been doing just that. So today, we’re going to look at how “carbon offsets” work and whether they are an effective tool for slowing climate change. For this episode, we sat down with carbon trading and offsets expert Dr. Barbara Haya from the University of California Berkeley. 

Dr. Barbara Haya is a Research Fellow at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley. She leads the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, which studies the effectiveness of offset programs and carbon trading with the goal of ensuring these programs and policies support effective climate action. Dr. Haya is also helping the University of California to develop its own strategy of using offsets to meet their carbon neutrality goals. Haya received her PhD at UC Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group, and has previously worked with NGOs to help support international offset program reform. 

For more episodes of TILclimate by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, visit tilclimate.mit.edu. To receive notifications about new episodes, follow us on Twitter @tilclimate.

Credits

• Laur Hesse Fisher, Host and Producer
• David Lishansky, Editor and Producer
• Aaron Krol, Associate Producer
• Adam Nacov, Student Production Assistant
• Sylvia Scharf, Education Specialist
• Michelle Harris, Fact Checker
• Music by Blue Dot Sessions
• Artwork by Aaron Krol