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by Corbin Hiar (E&E News) Biden, who has made climate change a centerpiece of his effort to defeat President Trump, pledged last year to offset his campaign’s carbon dioxide emissions by funding programs that reduce global greenhouse gases.

Yet so far the Biden campaign has offset roughly half of its emissions from the team’s transportation to rallies, fundraisers and other political events.

A spokesman told E&E News that the campaign’s contract with Advanced Aviation to provide flights for Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), includes carbon offsets. The campaign’s payments to the Virginia-based jet company make up less than 55% of the more than $5 million that the campaign has spent on transportation and likely represent only a plurality of its overall emissions, according to campaign filings and interviews.

That’s disappointing to climate scientists, who would like to see Biden’s team — which is on pace to raise more than $1 billion before the final votes are cast in 12 days — match its political promises on climate change with commensurate action. Biden has said global warming is an existential threat.

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Biden’s team is one of five Democratic campaigns that told The Washington Post in a May 2019 survey they planned to offset their emissions. The others were Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and billionaires Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer.

The offsets they promised to buy are shares of conservation projects that seek to either suck carbon dioxide or other heat-trapping gases out of the atmosphere or prevent them from being emitted in the first place.

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Of the Democrats, only the Sanders campaign made consistent payments to offset its emissions, according to a Center for Responsive Politics analysis of Federal Election Commission data conducted at the request of E&E News. Others, like the campaigns of Biden and former New York City Mayor Bloomberg, haven’t disclosed any specific spending on offsets.

The Sanders campaign made 13 payments totaling $61,202 to the offsets firm NativeEnergy between May 2019 and April 17 of this year, nine days after he withdrew from the primary. That’s more than every other Democratic campaign that has disclosed offsets combined.

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“Bringing up plane rides or bringing up hamburgers is bad faith criticism of folks who are actually trying to make a difference,” said Raad (Jamal Raad, Inslee’s former campaign spokesman), a campaign director at Evergreen Action, an environmental group he and other Inslee veterans helped launch.

Raad described carbon offsets as something nice for progressive campaigns to have, but not a necessity.

“I personally would not care if the Biden campaign offset their emissions,” he said. “I care about their plans to decarbonize our economy and create jobs in a new clean energy economy.”

Yet (Heidi) Roop, the University of Minnesota climate scientist, said she believes Biden and other candidates who have ambitious plans to fight climate change should do more to cut or offset the emissions of their own campaigns.  READ MORE