On Clinton’s announcement that she will be offsetting the campaign’s carbon footprint, Professor Michael Wara commented that purchasers of offsets must be diligent about ensuring that they’re supporting real projects that would not otherwise be happening anyway.

Hil­lary Clin­ton wants to make sure her pres­id­en­tial cam­paign doesn’t hurt the plan­et.

The Clin­ton cam­paign an­nounced on Tues­day that the former sec­ret­ary of State’s White House bid will be car­bon neut­ral. “We’ll be off­set­ting the car­bon foot­print of this cam­paign, and that in­cludes travel,” said Jesse Fer­guson, a cam­paign aide.

The an­nounce­ment ar­rived just days after Clin­ton star­ted rolling out her green-en­ergy and cli­mate-change plat­form — and after Re­pub­lic­an op­pos­i­tion re­search firm Amer­ica Rising re­leased a video of Clin­ton board­ing a private jet hours after talk­ing up her en­vir­on­ment­al plat­form in Iowa on Monday.
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Re­gard­less of the de­sire to off­set CO2 emis­sions, ex­perts cau­tion that pur­chasers of off­sets must be di­li­gent about en­sur­ing that they’re sup­port­ing real pro­jects that would not oth­er­wise be hap­pen­ing any­way. Buy­ing the ab­sence of emis­sions can be tricky, says Mi­chael Wara, an ex­pert on en­ergy and the en­vir­on­ment at Stan­ford Law School.

“It is a very com­plic­ated top­ic, par­tic­u­larly when you get in­to the vol­un­tary mar­kets, be­cause there is much less of a cop on the beat than in the reg­u­lated or com­pli­ance mar­kets,” he said, con­trast­ing vol­un­tary off­set pur­chases with off­sets ob­tained un­der reg­u­lat­ory pro­grams like the cap-and-trade sys­tems in Cali­for­nia and the European Uni­on.