Barbara Haya – Senior Fellow at the Center for Environmental Public Policy: The whole idea of carbon offsets is that greenhouse gases are well mixed in the atmosphere and that it doesn’t matter where the emission reductions happen. If it’s easier or less expensive to pay someone else to reduce emissions instead of reducing your own that’s the more efficient way of meeting a climate target.

Danny Cullenwald: Most of the discussion around climate policy originates with a market-oriented framework. The idea that if you introduce flexibility in where emission reductions occur you can reduce costs.

Basav Sen – Institute for Policy Studies: There’s a certain amount of truth to equating offsets with the so-called indulgences that people purchased from the church. In the sense that it’s a way to assure your conscience that you’re doing the right thing, that I can do whatever bad things I’m doing because I’m paying someone else to do something good.

Barbara Haya: In the United States the project type with the most credits is improved forest management. That project type is generating around half of all credits from projects in the U.S.

Thomas Joseph – Hoopa Valley Tribal Member with the Indigenous Environmental Network.: We say that this forest will sequester one ton of carbon, which would equal one credit. And so you’d be able to purchase that one ton of sequestered carbon so that your company can turn around and pollute that one ton of carbon that you so-called purchased from this forest.

Alex Budd – Pacific NW Forest Climate Alliance: A lot of forest offsets aren’t even necessarily we won’t cut this forest. They’re more like, we won’t cut this forest as frequently. We’ll let it grow a little bit longer than we would otherwise. Or we’ll built fewer roads. And so the premise there is that we’ll do some things that we wouldn’t do otherwise and as a result of that we will emit less carbon dioxide or the forest will sequester more carbon dioxide than it otherwise would and they get to sell that as a carbon credit to someone like Shell Oil.