Thanks to Marc Morano for alerting us to the article in the Los Angeles Times ‘Can you buy a greener conscience?‘
A budding industry sells ‘offsets’ of carbon emissions, investing in environmental projects. But there are doubts about whether it works.
By Alan Zarembo
September 2, 2007
The Oscar-winning film “An Inconvenient Truth” touted itself as the world’s first carbon-neutral documentary.
The producers said that every ounce of carbon emitted during production — from jet travel, electricity for filming and gasoline for cars and trucks — was counterbalanced by reducing emissions somewhere else in the world. It only made sense that a film about the perils of global warming wouldn’t contribute to the problem.
Co-producer Lesley Chilcott used an online calculator to estimate that shooting the film used 41.4 tons of carbon dioxide and paid a middleman, a company called Native Energy, $12 a ton, or $496.80, to broker a deal to cut greenhouse gases elsewhere. The film’s distributors later made a similar payment to neutralize carbon dioxide from the marketing of the movie.
It was a ridiculously good deal with one problem: So far, it has not led to any additional emissions reductions.
Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution.
According to Native Energy, money from “An Inconvenient Truth,” along with payments from others trying to neutralize their emissions, went to the developers of a methane collector on a Pennsylvanian farm and three wind turbines in an Alaskan village.
As it turned out, both projects had already been designed and financed, and the contributions from Native Energy covered only a minor fraction of their costs. “If you really believe you’re carbon neutral, you’re kidding yourself,” said Gregg Marland, a fossil-fuel pollution expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee who has been watching the evolution of the new carbon markets. “You can’t get out of it that easily.”
Read more.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I’m off to Spain, 5th to 14th September, but I won’t be lining anyone’s pockets by buying ‘aerial plant food offsets.’
Have a safe trip. Will you be posting new threads while you are in Spain?
Thanks Suzie. Not sure if I will have internet access at the hotel, but my wife won’t be too pleased if spend time reading emails and posting blogs! Last time we were in Florida, it was handy that the villa had a PC with permanent internet access, so I didn’t return home to find 100’s of unread emails, including lots of SPAM!
I write about this a lot on my site that covers global warming (http://www.globalwarming-factorfiction.com) and I am typically very skeptical of carbon trading schemes.
P.T. Barnum supposedly said that there was a sucker born every minute. Sometimes, when I read about carbon credits, I am not sure who the sucker is – the person buying, the person selling, or the general public for thinking it is helping!
In order for credits to be feasible and to be more than a “feel good” gesture, we need solid accounting, accountability, and penalties. We have none of that now and this article makes this painfully clear. We cannot allow credits to be used for minor contributions to a project. The credit must go to the cost of reducing the greenhouse gas.
Carbon credits will remain a fantasy as the world beings to appreciate it is more important to turn rain in carbohydrates than an unusable carbon sink. And that will mean unfamiliar agricultural systems in traditionally illogical European based production models.
Grain prices hyperinflating as I type …
Like with most products, there are many varieties and brands when it comes to offsets. The story and comments thus far don’t touch on this. Highlighting one dodgy scheme and using this to argue that all offset schemes are no good is as bad as writing off an entire product line (such as the automobile) because you have identified one dodgy brand or model.
Some offset schemes and types of offsets are either not so good, or are controversial. Tree planting is one.
Others are quite robust. The Australian Green Power scheme for example has been running since the 1990s, and is audited and accredited on a regular basis.
I won’t by tree offsets, but have no problem buying Green Power offsets.
The article also fails to highlight the difference between paying for an entire project, and simply buying the ‘credits’ from that project. This suggests a poor understanding of the rationale behind offsets. Offsets are not about making projects happen that wouldn’t have otherwise happened. They are about allowing people with no cheap or practical means of reducing emissions to pay someone else to do it for them if the price is right. That’s market efficiency.
I also think the talk of ‘guilt’ is simplistic. The whole point of offsets is to allow the market to find the best means of reducing emissions. THe idea of offsets has become fashionable because policy makers are trying to come up with market-based solutions, rather than sweeping laws and regulation. It is a good thing that they are taking this approach. REduce your emissions if you can, or else go into the market and buy a solution.
I can’t see a problem with paying for emission reductions elsewhere if you’ve decided it is not practical for you to do it yourself.
Kind of like how you pay for a pair of shoes, because it is inconvenient to make your own. Are you going to call me lazy and immoral for paying for shoes instead of making them myself?
“Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality…”
is as silly as
“Beneath the feel good simplicity of paying for goods and services using a medium of exchange instead of constructing the goods and performing the services yourself…”
Obviously, carbon credit trade is happening without governments mandating it. If one sucker wants to sell another sucker something, I’m not one to stand in the way. BUT, when we move into discussing carbon credit trading, we appear to capitulate on the fundamental question of whether anthropogenic CO2 emissions are bad. I always try to bring people back to the original GW debate. (Not that I want to do that in this thread! 🙂
“I always try to bring people back to the original GW debate.”
Janet, perhaps you should be in Sydney protesting about the APEC summit, given its attempts to come up with a Sydney Declaration on climate change. Sounds like the leaders of the world are beyond the debate you are trying to pull us back to.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=479572&in_page_id=1770
Each British family is paying £400 more in green taxes than it would cost to cover its carbon footprint, according to the TaxPayers’ Alliance.
It says green taxes raised £21.9billion in 2005 – £10billion more than the social cost of that year’s carbon emissions of £11.7billion.
Hi Schiller,
The study assumes that fuel excise is a ‘green tax’.
Obviously that isn’t right. Excise on commodities such as fuel, cigarettes, liquor and others has been a source of revenue for govts around the world for a long long time.
Note I’m not saying trying to defend excise duty. But I am saying that describing it as a ‘green tax’ for purposes of suggesting a problem with environmentally-motivated taxation is misleading.