Brit's Eye View: U.K. goes offset-crazy, but how much is it helping the planet?

Peter Madden ponders the upsides and downsides of CO2 offsetting

Posted by Peter Madden (Guest Contributor) at 3:25 PM on 24 Oct 2006

Read more about: United Kingdom | climate | energy | carbon offsets

This is the second installment of a monthly column on sustainability in the U.K. and Europe, from Peter Madden, chief executive of Forum for the Future, Britain's leading sustainable development charity. Read the first column here.

We have gone offset-crazy in the U.K. Open any newspaper or magazine at the moment and you'll see full-page advertisements from oil giant BP offering the chance to "neutralize the impact of your car's CO2 emissions."

Buy a new Range Rover, book a holiday with First Choice, or pay for a flight with British Airways and you are given the chance to offset. Even this year's World Cup declared itself "carbon neutral."

Government has got in on the act too, with a clutch of departments promising to offset their impacts.

For some environmentalists, though, this is all a dangerous distraction from the need to reduce emissions at source. Kevin Anderson, a climate-change scientist, argues, "Offsetting is a dangerous delaying tactic because it helps us to avoid tackling that task. It helps us to sleep well at night when we shouldn't sleep well at night."

Charles Liesenberg, an offset provider, argues the opposite: that because climate change is a global problem, "it doesn't matter where you reduce emissions, as long as you do it."

Opinions are polarized. So who is right? We at Forum for the Future had to ask ourselves this question when BP approached us to work with them on designing their customer offset scheme, "targetneutral."

This led to the kind of debates within our organization that we are seeing across the environmental movement. Some staff were against offsetting, arguing that it encourages guilt-free consumption and doesn't deflect us from a fossil-fuel trajectory. Others felt that if you accept the ideological case for emissions trading, which we do, you have to accept offsetting.

In the end, we decided to go ahead and do the work with BP. I think that some of the conditions we negotiated with them have wider lessons for how we should handle offsetting.

Offsetting should be the last thing you do, not the first. You have to reduce emissions as much as possible first; then -- and only then -- offset what you can't avoid. BP agreed to be clear about this on their targetneutral website. They tell motorists to follow a hierarchy of "reduce, replace, neutralize." We feel that it is a big step forward for an oil company to be saying that: "Just as every single one of us contributes to emissions every time we turn on our engine, so every single one of us can counter that by reducing the amount we drive, driving more efficiently in more efficient vehicles with better fuels, and neutralising our CO2 fuel emissions."

It can't just be about tree-planting. Trees are a risky form of offset, so risky indeed that forest projects are not allowed in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. Investments should be in renewable energy and energy efficiency, with additional social benefits where possible. BP is offsetting through biomass energy plants and a wind farm in India, as well as an animal-waste scheme in Mexico.

Offsets need to be properly validated. The global market is booming, currently doubling in size every year. With demand growing so quickly, and with few agreed rules and verification procedures in place, there are clearly opportunities for cowboys, for double-counting and double-selling. You have to make sure that whatever project you're using to offset your own emissions wouldn't have happened anyway without your funding. This is crucial to the whole concept of offsetting, but often overlooked. BP, with their international brand and strong expertise in trading, were particularly strict about this. They agreed to have an independent advisory panel oversee the effectiveness and integrity of the project, which we chair.

Handled properly, offsetting can help to increase "carbon literacy." The BP scheme aims to do so by bringing climate change directly to ordinary motorists on the gas-station forecourt. And through its advertising, it is actively encouraging each of us to think about our personal carbon impacts. Awareness-raising on climate change is important, whether it is done by BP or Pearl Jam. We have also pressed the company to commit to reducing and then offsetting its own carbon emissions.

The targetneutral offset scheme has now been launched and motorists are now signing up. An average British car, driven 10,000 miles in a year, generates approximately 3.5 tonnes of CO2. To offset this amount of carbon emissions costs around $30 a year.

My one big misgiving is that I still think offsetting is too cheap. This sends out entirely the wrong message about climate change. But offsetting does have a role to play -- in helping quantify emissions, in adding a value to carbon, and particularly in educating consumers about the carbon consequences of their decisions. So as long as it's the last resort, then yes, we should offset.

For story: Brit's Eye View: U.K. goes offset-crazy, but how much is it helping the planet?
6 Comments | Post a Comment

Wait a minute,

Trees are a risky form of offset, so risky indeed that forest projects are not allowed in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme. Investments should be in renewable energy and energy efficiency, with additional social benefits where possible.

Unless you can pay owners to protect their trees instead of burn them.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 5:00 PM on 24 Oct 2006

and then there is this...

http://grist.org/news/daily/2006/10/24/5/

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 5:08 PM on 24 Oct 2006

But the point stands...

Madden is right though: forestry-related offsets are considered relatively risky because someone may decide to come along and burn them down, because they are subject to wildfire, disease, and effects of climate change, and because they can often turn into monocrop plantation nightmares that offer marginal carbon benefits, but without much to benefit local people or habitat.

Paying someone not to burn trees is possible, but a difficult way to market improvements, and sounds a lots like extortion ("give me all your money or I'll set this forest on fire!"). Not too popular. A government could potentially make this kind of payment to its own people to maintain forest stocks counted in its national GHG inventory, but it's unlikey that there would be much in the way of fungible offsets generated by paying someone not to burn down a forest.

by geosynchronous at 1:35 PM on 25 Oct 2006

So far, I'm not very impressed with Europe.

I think it is almost comical that they didn't foresee the fact that people would burn down their rainforests to grow biofuels for them. Not real smart, not real smart at all. Monbiot also saw this biofuel nightmare coming.

Extortion? If someone were willing to pay me for every year my forest remained intact, I would go out of my way to make sure it stayed that way. Letting it burn down would cost me my income. My job would become protecting the rainforest.

Maybe they should rethink their rules yet again. Europe is already starting to burn biodiesel made from palm oil. Malaysia has already run out of land to grow more.

The sustainably grown palm oil concept won't work. You need land to make more palm oil. It hasn't worked for the food industry, and it sure won't work when cars start eating a hundred times as much oil. Look at the numbers. Preventing the destruction of rainforest carbon sinks would dwarf renewable energy schemes.

The rainforests being burned today to make room for more palm oil are in large part the result of Europe's demand for cheap biodiesel. It isn't a hypothetical situation anymore. It is now real and getting worse every single day.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 2:28 PM on 25 Oct 2006

good Quality carbon offsets work

Again,

Carbon offsets are not a way for you to atone for your sins of using fossil-derived energy, for the guilt you feel for driving an SUV (poorly) or sleeping with the stereo on all night, the heat cranked, and the window open in Oregon in February.

YES, if you are serious about addressing your impact then you should either move to another planet (or country) or modify your lifestyle as much as you can to reduce-reduce-reduce your eco-footprint as much as you can, and then (and only then) offset the CO2 from the energy you have to use. C'mon, PEOPLE, that's the message that we need to get out there!

No one (on this site) would advocate we close all the hospitals and schools and stop producing food and medicine and other stuff - but we can begin to transition toward more sustainabile practices, use energy in more efficient ways, and promote new renewable energy projects, like I do with Native Energy to offset my home and my car.

Of course, TREES ARE ALWAYS a great idea - just not as a means of tackling the global heating crisis. That's temporary sequestration, not elimination of the problem - duh! Trees don't last; they all eventually get harvested or burn, decay, and release their stored carbon into the atmosphere - they are supposed to because they are part of the ecosystem. The solution to the problem we contribute to remains: we have to stop introducing carbon into the terrestrial ecocycle.
And, the only way to do that is to reduce our fossil fuel consumption - and overall resource consumption -- and work to change our sources of energy - to wind, solar, tidal, wave, biomass, geothermal, ch&p, etc.

High quality carbon offsets are a good first step because they can actually help to push fossil fuel-derived energy off the grid, thus reducing the carbon emissions without reducing energy. When you combine new renewable energy projects with efficiencies you've got a dramatically reduced carbon footprint, which is a step in the right direction. Yes, it works that way!

Again, make your eco-footprint smaller and smaller, and then offset the rest. And stop planting trees and calling it offsetting your energy impact!! Plant trees and call it the right thing to do for reforestation, eco-resotration, etc.

- m.sully

quitcher bitchin'

by MSully at 4:57 PM on 25 Oct 2006

We need to cut emissions, not just offset....

Frank Ackerman of the Global Development And Environment Institute says we we have to start turning off greenhouse gas emissions now:
http://www.newsquoter.com/ViewQuote.aspx?QuoteId=353

by Newsquoter at 7:23 AM on 27 Oct 2006

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