A
complete guide to carbon offsetting
Duncan Clark summarises
the offsetting debate in this edited extract from The Rough Guide to Green Living
Most of
the best-known carbon offset schemes have switched from tree planting to
clean-energy projects – including capturing methane gas at landfill sites.
Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA
Friday 16 September 2011 11.13 BSTLast modified on
Tuesday 3 June 201422.21 BST
Carbon
offset schemes allow individuals and companies to invest in environmental
projects around the world in order to balance out their own carbon footprints. The projects are usually
based in developing countries and most commonly are designed to reduce future
emissions. This might involve rolling out clean energy technologies or
purchasing and ripping up carbon credits from an emissions trading scheme. Other schemes work
by soaking up CO2 directly from the air through the planting of
trees.
Some
people and organisations offset their entire carbon footprint while others aim
to neutralise the impact of a specific activity, such as taking a flight. To do
this, the holidaymaker or business person visits an offset website, uses the
online tools to calculate the emissions of their trip, and then pays the offset
company to reduce emissions elsewhere in the world by the same amount – thus
making the flight "carbon neutral".
Offset
schemes vary widely in terms of the cost, though a fairly typical fee would be
around £8/$12 for each tonne of CO2 offset. At this price, a
typical British family would pay around £45 to neutralise a year's worth of gas
and electricity use, while a return flight from London to San Francisco would
clock in at around £20 per ticket.
Increasingly,
many products are also available with carbon neutrality included as part of the
price. These range from books about environmental topics through to
high-emission cars (new Land Rovers include offsets for the
production of the vehicle and the first 45,000 miles of use).
Over
the past decade, carbon offsetting has become increasingly popular, but it has
also become – for a mixture reasons – increasingly controversial.
Is the whole concept of offsetting a scam?
Traditionally,
much of the criticism of offsetting relates to the planting of trees. Some of
these concerns are valid, but in truth most of the best-known carbon offset
schemes have long-since switched from tree planting to clean-energy projects –
anything from distributing efficient cooking stoves through
tocapturing methane gas at landfill sites.
Energy-based projects such as these are designed to make quicker and more
permanent savings than planting trees, and, as a bonus, to offer social
benefits. Efficient cooking stoves, for instance, can help poor families save
money on fuel and improve their household air quality – a very real benefit in
many developing countries.
Even in
the case of energy-based schemes, however, many people argue that offsetting is
unhelpful – or even counterproductive – in the fight against climate change.
For example, writerGeorge Monbiot famously compared carbon offsets with the ancient
Catholic church's practice of selling indulgences: absolution from
sins and reduced time in purgatory in return for financial donations to the
church. Just as indulgences allowed the rich to feel better about sinful
behaviour without actually changing their ways, carbon offsets allow us to
"buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction", Monbiot
claimed. "Our guilty consciences appeased, we continue to fill up our SUVs
and fly round the world without the least concern about our impact on the
planet … it's like pushing the food around on your plate to create the
impression that you have eaten it."
A
similar if more humorous point is made by the spoof websiteCheatNeutral.com,
which parodies carbon neutrality by offering a similar service for infidelity.
"When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and
jealousy in the atmosphere," the website explains. "CheatNeutral
offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and not cheat.
This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear
conscience."
CheatNeutral
may be tongue-in-cheek but the indulgence and cheating analogies have both
become de facto arguments against carbon offsetting. But do the comparisons
stand up? Not according to David Roberts, staff writer at Grist. "If there
really were such a thing as sin, and there was a finite amount of it in the
world, and it was the aggregate amount of sin that mattered rather than any
individual's contribution, and indulgences really did reduce aggregate sin, then
indulgences would have been a perfectly sensible idea," Roberts has written, mirroring similar claims made by
others sympathetic to offsetting. "The comparison is a weak and transparent
smear, which makes me wonder why critics rely so heavily on it."
And what about the claim
that people use offsetting as a way to avoid changing their unenvironmentally
friendly ways? This is nonsense, too, according to the offset schemes
themselves, which claim that most of their customers are also taking steps to
reduce their emissions directly. A report from Britain's National Consumer
Council and Sustainable Development Commission agreed with this perspective:
"a positive approach to offsetting could have public resonance well beyond
the CO2 offset, and would help to build awareness of the need
for other measures."
Ultimately,
the question of whether the concept of offsetting is valid must come down to
the individual. If you offset to assuage guilt and to make yourself feel better
about high-carbon activities such as flying, that can't be good. If you offset
as part of cutting your footprint, or as an incentive to be greener (after all,
the less you emit, the less it will cost you to go carbon neutral) then that
can't be bad – especially if the offset projects offer extra benefits such as
poverty reduction in the developing world.
Do offset projects actually deliver the carbon
benefits they promise?
Arguments
about guilty consciences aside, the key issue for anyone who does want to
offset is whether the scheme you're funding actually achieves the carbon
savings promised. This boils down not just to the effectiveness of the project
at soaking up CO2 or avoiding future emissions. Effectiveness
is important but not enough. You also need to be sure that the carbon savings
are additional to any savings which might have happened anyway.
Take
the example of an offset project that distributes low-energy lightbulbs in a
developing country, thereby reducing energy consumption over the coming years.
The carbon savings would only be classified as additional if the project
managers could demonstrate that, for the period in which the carbon savings of
the new lightbulbs were being counted, the recipients wouldn't have acquired
low-energy bulbs by some other means.
The
problem is that it's almost impossible to prove additionality with absolute
certainly, as no one can be sure what will happen in the future, or what would
have happened if the project had never existed. For instance, in the case of
the lightbulb project, the local government might start distributing low-energy
bulbs to help reduce pressure on the electricity grid. If that happened, the
bulbs distributed by the offset company would cease to be additional, since the
energy savings would have happened even if the offset project had never
happened.
Partly
because of the difficulty of ensuring additionality, many offset providers
guarantee their emissions savings. This way, if the emissions savings don't
come through or they turn out to be "non-additional", the provider
promises to make up the loss via another project.
As the
offset market grows, some offset companies have enough capital to invest in
projects speculatively: they fund an offset project and then sell the carbon
savings once the cuts have actually been made. This avoids the difficulty of
predicting the future – and also avoids the claim that a carbon cut made some
years in the future is worth less than a cut made now.
These
kinds of guarantees and policies provide some reassurances, but do they mean
anything in the real world? Without actually visiting the offset projects
ourselves, how can individuals be sure that the projects are functioning as
they should?
To try
and answer these questions, the voluntary offset market has developed various
standards, which are a bit like the certification systems used for fairly
traded or organic food. These include the Voluntary
Gold Standard (VGS) and theVoluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
VGS-certified offsets are audited according to the rules laid out in the Kyoto
protocol and must also show social benefits for local communities. The VCS,
meanwhile, aims to be just as rigorous but without being as expensive or
bureaucratic to set up, thereby allowing a greater range of innovative
small-scale projects.
Offsets with these standards offer extra
credibility, but that still doesn't make them watertight. Heather Rogers,
author of Green Gone Wrong, visited a number of offset
schemes in India and found all kinds of irregularities. One VGS-certified
biomass power plant refused to allow her around, though staff there reported a
number of concerns such as trees being chopped down and sold to the plant,
which was designed to run on agricultural wastes.
Even if
offset projects do work as advertised, some environmentalists argue that
they're still a bad idea. If we're to tackle climate change, they argue, the
projects being rolled out by offset companies should be happening anyway,
funded by governments around the world, while companies and individuals reduce
their carbon footprints directly. Only in this way – by doing everything
possible to make reductions everywhere, rather than polluting in one place and
offsetting in another – does the world have a good chance of avoiding runaway
climate change, such critics claim.
On the
other hand, some carbon-neutrality advocates suggest offsetting
carbon-intensive activities such as flights two or three or even ten times
over. This, they argue, allows individuals not just to stop their total carbon
footprint from going up, but actually to make it fall.
The price of offsetting
Many
people are confused by the low prices of carbon offsets. If it's so bad for the
environment to fly, can a few pounds really be enough to counteract the impact?
The answer is that, at present, there are all kinds of ways to reduce emissions
very inexpensively. After all, a single low-energy lightbulb, available for
just £1 or so, can over the space of six years save 250kg of CO2 –
equivalent to a short flight. That's not to say that offsetting is necessarily
valid, or that plugging in a low-energy lightbulb makes up for flying. The
point is simply that the world is full of inexpensive ways to reduce emissions.
In theory, if enough people started offsetting, or if governments started
acting seriously to tackle global warming, then the price of offsets would
gradually rise, as the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings – the easiest and
cheapest "quick wins" – would get used up.
Another
frequent point of confusion about the cost of offsetting is that different
offset companies quote different prices for offsetting the same activity. There
are two reasons for this. First, there are various ways of estimating the
precise impact on climate change of certain types of activity – including
flying, which affects global temperature in various different ways.
Second, different types of offset project will inevitably have different costs
– especially given that projects may be chosen not just for the CO2 impacts but
for their broader social benefits.
• This
article is adapted from The Rough Guide to Green Living by Duncan
Clark.
Notes
on CO2 emissions footprint calculator:
The carbon footprint
calculator is not designed to be 100% accurate as there are too many variables
required in order to give a reliable emissions total. It is simply to give you
an indication on how much carbon dioxide you generate and how many trees it
would take to offset those emissions.
Bear in mind that just
about all we do in modern life produces a carbon footprint, well over and above
what occurs in the natural world. For instance, the computer you are viewing
this on was produced using processes that create carbon emissions.
Offsetting should be seen as a last resort; reduction in consumption is the
first line of defense against global warming.
Unlike many carbon
footprint calculators available on the web, I thought I'd let people know how
these figures are arrived at in my script. The calculations are based on the
following:
Household electricity is based on a figure of 1.5 pounds of carbon emissions
per kilowatt hour generated by a coal fired power station.3 Averages
for USA based on Department of Energy, for Canada, the Ontario Ministry for
Energy; for the UK, UK Environment Watch and for Australia, various state
government environmental departments (averaged)
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