The Big Air Shougang, venue for the freestyle skiing and snowboard events for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Beijing Winter Olympics’ claim to “carbon neutrality” is based on junk offsets that do little or nothing to counteract the emissions of the games, making the assertion little more than marketing. “We have a shrinking window of time to substantially rein in our emissions,” said Barbara Haya, research fellow at the University of California at Berkeley. Offsets allow all kinds of organizations to “claim to be decarbonizing when they’re just paying for business-as-usual,” she added. To back its carbon-neutral claim, BOCOG secured 1.7 million offset credits, each of which is supposed to neutralize the impact of one ton of CO₂ emissions. BOCOG estimates the games’ total carbon footprint is about 1.3 million tons of CO₂. Offsets, if they worked well, would more than compensate for the climate […]