Hot Air and Snake Oil: Carbon Offset Upsets
01/02/2008
- Opinión
All carbon offset projects are beset by contradictions and inconsistencies, writes Kevin Smith.
There are often reports in the media exposing a particular scandalous aspect of a certain offset project, such as a lack of community consultation, or the fact that the project was going to happen anyway without the money from the offsets company and what was being sold was ‘hot air’. There are a number of contradictions and inconsistencies that are fundamental to all offset projects.
1) No one can quantify how much of a ‘climate benefit’ a project generates. Dan Welch, who conducted a comparative study of offset providers for the Ethical Consumer magazine, summarized this problem when he described offsets as “an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.” There is so much speculation in trying to calculate what might have happened if you hadn’t contributed a certain amount of money to a certain project. In practice, this makes it impossible to establish a meaningful degree of equivalence between the ‘climate benefit’ that is being sold and the carbon emissions that are supposed to be being ‘offset’.
2) Carbon is permanently locked up in the ‘inactive’ carbon pool in the form of fossil fuels until it is extracted and burnt, and then it is released into the ‘active carbon pool’, a complex and incessant interchange between the oceans, forests and atmosphere. The only, incontrovertible way of dealing with climate change is to severely limit the flow of carbon from the inactive pool into the active cycle. This flow is a one-way process, and no matter how many offset projects are carried out, you can not reverse the damage that is done when carbon is released from one cycle to the other. It cannot be ‘neutralised’.
3) Offsets do nothing to reduce emissions. While there is widespread agreement that reductions in the order of 80% by 2050 are necessary in industrialized counties if we are to avoid climate chaos, there is nothing in the idea of offsets that would set an end to fossil fuel burning. Northern countries could continue burning fossil fuel without much changing, provided there is always that extra bit of space for one more windmill or a few more solar panels in order to compensate for the extra emissions. The result would still be atmospheric greenhouse gas levels that will trigger climate chaos, despite the offset windmills, solar panels or energy efficient cookers distributed to rural villagers in the South. Mike Mason, the founder of Climate Care once remarked that “I would rather that 100 per cent of people offset their emissions from flights than 50 per cent of those people not fly at all.” This highlights another major limitation of carbon offsets:
4) They individualise responsibility and are a major distraction from creating the public pressure that will be required to achieve the systemic energy and transport infrastructure changes we need to make low-carbon economies a possibility. Appealing to individuals to change light-bulbs, turn off stand-by electronics and use offsets for the rest will not avert the crisis we are facing while our energy infrastructure is being systemically locked into another fifty years of fossil fuel dependence and our transport infrastructure remains focused on building more roads for ever more passenger cars and freight trucks.
5) Finally, there is the time lag issue. In fact there are two: First, when carbon is released into the atmosphere, it is part of the problem in terms of climate change, but the various carbon offset schemes are operating to supposedly neutralize these emissions over a much longer period of time, sometimes, as in the case of forestry offsets, over a period of a hundred years or more. If an individual or company keeps offsetting regularly, their rate of emissions increases rises at a much faster rate than the rate at which their activities are being ‘neutralised’ to the point at which, far from being ‘carbon neutral’, quite the opposite is true. The carbon in the atmosphere increases at a far greater rate than it’s supposed ‘neutralisation’. Secondly, many if not most offset operators in the voluntary carbon market trade in ‘future’ reductions, selling their offset credits often long before the actual reduction that has been sold with the offset actually happens – or is hoped to happen.
- Kevin Smith, Celsias.
Source: TNI www.tni.org
There are often reports in the media exposing a particular scandalous aspect of a certain offset project, such as a lack of community consultation, or the fact that the project was going to happen anyway without the money from the offsets company and what was being sold was ‘hot air’. There are a number of contradictions and inconsistencies that are fundamental to all offset projects.
1) No one can quantify how much of a ‘climate benefit’ a project generates. Dan Welch, who conducted a comparative study of offset providers for the Ethical Consumer magazine, summarized this problem when he described offsets as “an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.” There is so much speculation in trying to calculate what might have happened if you hadn’t contributed a certain amount of money to a certain project. In practice, this makes it impossible to establish a meaningful degree of equivalence between the ‘climate benefit’ that is being sold and the carbon emissions that are supposed to be being ‘offset’.
2) Carbon is permanently locked up in the ‘inactive’ carbon pool in the form of fossil fuels until it is extracted and burnt, and then it is released into the ‘active carbon pool’, a complex and incessant interchange between the oceans, forests and atmosphere. The only, incontrovertible way of dealing with climate change is to severely limit the flow of carbon from the inactive pool into the active cycle. This flow is a one-way process, and no matter how many offset projects are carried out, you can not reverse the damage that is done when carbon is released from one cycle to the other. It cannot be ‘neutralised’.
3) Offsets do nothing to reduce emissions. While there is widespread agreement that reductions in the order of 80% by 2050 are necessary in industrialized counties if we are to avoid climate chaos, there is nothing in the idea of offsets that would set an end to fossil fuel burning. Northern countries could continue burning fossil fuel without much changing, provided there is always that extra bit of space for one more windmill or a few more solar panels in order to compensate for the extra emissions. The result would still be atmospheric greenhouse gas levels that will trigger climate chaos, despite the offset windmills, solar panels or energy efficient cookers distributed to rural villagers in the South. Mike Mason, the founder of Climate Care once remarked that “I would rather that 100 per cent of people offset their emissions from flights than 50 per cent of those people not fly at all.” This highlights another major limitation of carbon offsets:
4) They individualise responsibility and are a major distraction from creating the public pressure that will be required to achieve the systemic energy and transport infrastructure changes we need to make low-carbon economies a possibility. Appealing to individuals to change light-bulbs, turn off stand-by electronics and use offsets for the rest will not avert the crisis we are facing while our energy infrastructure is being systemically locked into another fifty years of fossil fuel dependence and our transport infrastructure remains focused on building more roads for ever more passenger cars and freight trucks.
5) Finally, there is the time lag issue. In fact there are two: First, when carbon is released into the atmosphere, it is part of the problem in terms of climate change, but the various carbon offset schemes are operating to supposedly neutralize these emissions over a much longer period of time, sometimes, as in the case of forestry offsets, over a period of a hundred years or more. If an individual or company keeps offsetting regularly, their rate of emissions increases rises at a much faster rate than the rate at which their activities are being ‘neutralised’ to the point at which, far from being ‘carbon neutral’, quite the opposite is true. The carbon in the atmosphere increases at a far greater rate than it’s supposed ‘neutralisation’. Secondly, many if not most offset operators in the voluntary carbon market trade in ‘future’ reductions, selling their offset credits often long before the actual reduction that has been sold with the offset actually happens – or is hoped to happen.
- Kevin Smith, Celsias.
Source: TNI www.tni.org
https://www.alainet.org/es/node/125475
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