Last November Lion announced that Steinlager - which has a 10 per cent share of the local market - had achieved carbon zero status.

In the blokey tone typical of beer advertising, Lion compared the 3.2 kg of CO2 emitted during the production of a dozen bottles of Steinlager to driving 13 km in a Toyota Hilux or having your BBQ on full flame for 1.2 hours.

Not insignificant but based on the current NZU price of $38 that works out at about 12 cents per dozen or one cent per bottle.

As we’ll hear, Lion offsets on the voluntary market, so the price could be slightly higher or lower depending on the offsets they’re using.

Offsetting your pint

In the blurb announcing Steinlager’s status as the nation’s first certified carbon zero beer, Lion senior brand manager Geoff Kidd said: “The everyday beer lover doesn’t always consider the environmental impact of the beer in their hand, however now they can enjoy Steinlager knowing that the carbon footprint has been 100 per cent offset.”

When Carbon News visited a couple of Wellington bars, in an earlier instalment of the Beer Diaries, and asked drinkers whether Lion’s carbon zero status would influence their choice of beer not a single patron thought it would.

All were supportive of moves by businesses to cut their emissions but sceptical that Lion really was greener than small, independent breweries.

"If they achieve carbon neutrality by offsetting it won’t make any difference to how I feel about their beer. I don’t put much stock in offsetting,” is how Tracy - a visitor from Auckland - put it.

Carbon News asked Toitu’s general manager Josephine Rudkin-Binks to respond to Tracy’s concerns.

“Lion going carbonzero means that they are committed to doing no harm right now, while they continue to work to reduce emissions.

“In order to achieve Toitu carbonzero certification, any organisation or product must develop a reduction target and plan and must prove they are making reductions on at least a six year cycle,

“Toitu carbonzero requires an annual audit that monitors progress towards targets.  We know that reductions can take time that the climate can’t always afford, so offsets are a great option to help balance the scales in the short term to have less impact,” Rudkin-Binks said.

The offsetting sceptics

Tracy isn’t alone in having doubts about offsetting. Journalist George Monbiot memorably compared the idea offsetting to the Catholic Church’s selling of indulgences in the Middle Ages.

In April three senior climate scientists wrote an article for the Conversation declaring the concept of carbon zero a dangerous trap.

James Dyke, Robert Watson and Wolfgang Knorr, who between them have worked on climate change science for more than 80 years, concluded: “Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to.”

“They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now.”

And in another Conversation piece, Robert Watt, a lecturer in political science at Manchester University, said carbon offsets offered a fantasy of capitalism without crises.

Emilien Hoet, Head of ClimatePartner UK, a company that helps businesses offset their emissions, wrote a response to the criticisms saying it was all very well to criticise offsetting, but the critics needed viable alternatives.

“It is simply not feasible to fight climate change without projects which avoid, reduce and remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. So let’s not ask if we need offsetting but, what kind of offsetting is most effective?”

Hoet said companies should always prioritise investment in reductions above offsets.

“Moving over your vehicle fleet to electric, procuring renewable energy, paying more for a low carbon raw material, implementing energy efficiency measures are all examples of investments that you can act on today.”

Reducing before offsetting

When asked for concrete examples of how it had cut its emissions, for an earlier instalment of the Beer Diaries, Lion provided the following bullet points:

• Reduce product boil times
• Optimise tunnel pasteuriser performance
• CIP temperature reductions
• Boiler operational pressure reduced
• Improve hot water tank performance and heat recovery processes

To, an admittedly untrained eye, those all look like savings that have been made at zero extra cost to the brewer.

Rudkin-Binks confirmed that there are often savings to be had and said companies could fund ongoing carbon reductions from those cost savings.

“Lion are early into their decarbonisation journey, so like most organisations you tick off the quick wins first and then make plans for the more complex reductions - like switching heat sources etc - that take longer to implement.”

Those heat sources include fossil fuelled powered boilers in the case of Lion – not something most would associate with a carbon zero brewery, and as we heard in an early instalment of the beer diaries something that the self-declared world first carbon zero brewery in Gos Austria did away with as long ago as 2016.

Voluntary offsets

Breweries aren’t among the industries required to participate in the Emissions Trading Scheme, so it’s Lion’s choice to offset its emissions and it does so by buying offsets from the voluntary market.

The idea is simple. For every tonne of CO2 a company emits it finds an organisation offsetting a tonne.

So, what does that one cent that Lion spends on offsetting your bottle of Steinlager go towards?

Well, it’s divided equally between a 738-hectare Maori owned native rainforest next to the Fiordland National Park and a wind farm in in Chitradurga, India.

The Rarakau forest is a mix of silver beech, miro and totara and it’s owned by the Rowallan Alton (Maori) Incorporation.

The forest captures about 2458 tonnes carbon dioxide per year. The Incorporation has around 14000 shareholders and its carbon offsetting earns around $50,000 a year. The money is used for fencing, pest control and building tourist infrastructure.

It’s a fascinating project and you can read an excellent backgrounder on it here.

An environmental consultant, who looked into the project as part of an audit of another organisation’s offsetting, told Carbon News it was as transparent, honest, genuine, reliable, conservative, verifiable, safeguarded, methodologically “sound" as we could ever realistically hope for.”

But, the consultant, who asked not to be named, said despite that Rarakau was exceedingly unlikely to reduce worldwide GHG emissions by the amount claimed due to “leakage.”

The problem of leakage is acknowledged in Rarakau Forest Carbon Project: Project Description Documentation which says any decline in the availability of native hardwoods in New Zealand is likely to be met with imports from Indonesia.

In other words, a tree saved in Aotearoa could simply end up being one lost in Borneo.

Toitu responded by saying it follows the best practice rules of ICROA for any credits used by its clients.

Finally, what does it cost an organisation like Lion to have their emissions audited? That would be between $30,000 and $40,000 per year or the same as offsetting between three and four million bottles of Steinlager.

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The Beer Diaries: The greening of your lager and Decarbonising Grog's own country