Back when they were initially proposed (in the late 1980’s
early 1990’s) the idea of carbon offsets seemed like a very good one. The
thought was that controlling carbon emissions couldn’t be done right away. So
during the transition we needed a bridge that would allow existing firms to continue
to function as they transitioned to carbon-free operations. If you ran a
company that absolutely couldn't do without emitting carbon then rather than shuttering
your doors, and causing immediate economic hardship, maybe buying an offset would
make up for the net carbon emitted in the necessary operation of your business.
At the time the supporters of carbon offsets battled the supporters of “cap-and-trade”
to determine what would be the dominant way to reduce regional/national/international
carbon emissions. Since “cap-and-trade” needed full government buy-in and
regulation, it was easily bested by the speed and apparent efficiency provided
by carbon offsets.
From their beginnings carbon offsets have had their problems.
The biggest being ensuring that the buyer was getting what they paid for. In
the early days of carbon trading con-men saw the opportunity for a quick buck
and many a company paid to preserve South American or Central American
rainforests only to discover that all they had done was enrich a middleman. One
of the best known of these scams was the “Vatican forest” which started as a
plan to plant forests in Hungary and ended up with no forests and the Vatican
losing both face and money. The oversight these days is much improved, but as I
have written elsewhere, even the best laid plans (like say biofuel plantations)
can fail to meet their goals of reducing carbon emissions.
From its well-meaning roots the idea of carbon offsets has
fallen out of favour in the environmental community. The most scathing attack I
have read to date was penned by noted author and journalist George Monbiot who
likened it to the purchasing of indulgences during the middle ages. For those
of you not familiar with the concept, during the middle ages the Catholic Church
sold an item called an indulgence, which essentially was a “get out of hell
free card”. If you happened to have the bad luck to die out of a state of grace
(without having given final confession and thus with unforgiven sins still on
your ledger) then your family could pay the church and your sins would be retroactively
forgiven. Once your sins were forgiven your soul would, theoretically, then be
able to ascend into heaven. Soon the selling of forgiveness became quite the
thing and in some precincts you could pre-pay for your sins. So before you went
off to murder someone you dropped the right number of pennies in the jar and if
you should happen to be killed in the process you still got a promise of heaven.
Needless to say many saw the selling of indulgences as ethically and morally
wrong with the most famous being Martin Luther (of Lutheran fame) whose “Ninety-Five Theses” did a pretty
reasonable job of demolishing the moral and intellectual support for the
concept.
These days I view carbon offsets with the same level of
disdain that Martin Luther viewed purchasing of indulgences in 1521. Were
I to prepare my own 95 environmental theses, carbon offsets would be right up
there at the top of my list. The point of the carbon offset was to move us away
from our love affair with carbon and the method of doing so was through the
pain of payment. Nowadays they are used to avoid having to make hard choices or
make any personal sacrifices in lifestyle. These indulgences are now simply a sop
to the conscience and basically represent a rich person's way of saying "Not
only am I rich enough to fly on a private jet emitting carbon to my
heart's content, I am also rich enough to buy myself some salvation at the
other end" It is bad enough when a billionaire businessman flies his
personal jet to Davos Switzerland to lecture the world on profligacy but to
then say that he didn’t really emit carbon because he paid some cash, that just
is the icing on the cake. It is no different than the cut-purse in 1520 dropping
a penny in the jar so he can go about robbing old women with a clean conscious and
the apparent blessing of the church. The point of the exercise is not to emit
carbon unnecessarily (or in the case of the cut-purse not to steal). The intention was never to emit
it profligately and then throw the equivalent of a couple pennies in the jar.
While I think it is clear how I view the use of carbon
offsets to allow for profligate lifestyles there is another level of
environmental insult I find even more obnoxious. That is hypocritical
protestors who not only buy indulgences for their carbon sins but then have the
gall to protests the safest means of transporting their carbon indulgences to
market. In my local region there is a battle going on about pipelines. As
everyone knows pipelines represent the safest way of transporting petroleum
hydrocarbons across long distances and over perilous and environmentally-sensitive
terrain. Well one of the leading lights of the anti-pipeline campaign in my
region has a habit of traipsing around the world by commercial jet. As anyone
informed in environmental action knows commercial jets are some of the worst
emitters of carbon per kilometer travelled. In any world where we want to
reduce the emission of carbon we have to reduce the number of fossil fuel-powered jetliners cruising the skies. This individual argues that he needs to
travel to do his good works but the trips always seem to include a component of
fun and relaxation at the feature destinations. The individual excuses his sins
by pointing out that he buys carbon offsets and thus his carbon debt has been paid.
Of course this offset completely ignores the fact that real fossil fuels had to
be used to fly those airplanes and those real fossil fuels had to get to the
refinery and then the airport to allow the airplanes to take off. Being rich enough to fly around the world and
then buy carbon offsets doesn’t mean you use less fuel in your travels only
that you have a sop to your conscious while doing so. The original goal of carbon offsets was to aid
in reducing demand for carbon-intensive fuels but as we see these days carbon offsets do
nothing to reduce that demand. Arguably because of their relatively low costs carbon
offsets actually exacerbate the problem by allowing people, who should know
better, to believe they are actually helping the environment as they live their
lifestyles of the rich and famous.
To be clear, there are many who will disagree with my views on
carbon offsets, and after this posting I am pretty sure I will hear from many
of them here. What I want to hear from these people is: what does that offset
do to reduce demand for fossil fuels? What does that offset do to reduce the
environmental risks associated with extracting those fossil fuels from the
earth? What does that offset do to reduce the risks in transporting those fossil
fuels to refineries? What does that offset do to reduce the risks of
moving those refined fuels to market? What does that offset do to reduce the
secondary environmental concerns associated with air travel? Answer me these
questions and prove to me that carbon offsets don’t represent a Basilica to bad
policy.
Hmm. This piece was bad for your prospects of getting paid for what you are doing on this site.
ReplyDeleteI generally have a point of major disagreement or two on substance in every essay. This time I think you are making a very interesting point.
Why is it so hard for you to believe that you don't have to be employed to take issue with warmist dogma? Some of us actually see some good in fossil fuels and genuine flaws in renewables and fiascos like carbon offsets. It's childish to assume otherwise and deeply damages the credibility of those who use it to demean others. Dirty tricks are the sort of thing the bad guys are supposed to get up to.
DeleteOffsets are the sort of thing that might see billionaires portioning up the Earth's wild spaces and oceans and claiming those CO2 sinks for themselves. A brand new way to divide the haves and the have nots.
Only idiots dismiss the good that fossil fuels and capitalism have done for people. Real people, the plebs, not just the rich. Sure, those things have some bad side effects. What bloody doesn't?
Anyone wanting to persuade society to abandon what we know works, should do so with huge amounts of humility.
Happily for me I have no plans to make money off this blog. It is just my way of getting some thoughts I've had out there. I'm happily employed with a family I love and no plans on anything bigger than turning my three little ones into good people. If I could also get some of my policy friends thinking differently, that would be good as well.
ReplyDeleteFor B.C. context, your article might have mentioned Darkwoods
ReplyDeletehttp://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/07/22/StrangeOffsets/
Thanks for the reference, I had not seen that one...
Delete