I'm "disingenuous" because I don't acknowledge that "the indulgence metaphor is primarily aimed at CDM and JT under the Kyoto treaty"? The mind boggles. Here's a wager: of the set of people who have used the indulgence metaphor, I'd bet that 98% of them have never heard of "CDM and JT under the Kyoto treaty." And I'd bet you're 1% of that 2%. Anyway, given that the entire discussion over the last week has been about the private, voluntary market, your definition of "disingenuous" is, uh, strained.

I honestly had thought it would be obvious, but here, as simply as I can put it, is why the indulgences metaphor is dumb: Sin is personal. CO2 is not. We instinctively judge it immoral that one person could pawn his sin off on another, because sin is intrinsically a moral matter, a personal responsibility. But CO2 isn't. It doesn't matter where the CO2 is reduced, or what the source was, or who was responsible for it. CO2 is not sin, it's a molecule. Buying a reduction from someone else is exactly, precisely as good as reducing the equivalent amount of your own emissions, and doing both is exactly twice as good. The number of molecules is the only relevant metric -- which is, again, not true of sin.

When I buy an offset, I'm paying to prevent some CO2 from going up. That's it. It has no effect on what else I do. You, like everyone else, assert without evidence that it induces people to pollute more, but that comports neither with surveys nor with common sense.

Voluntary offset sales act as viral marketing for cap and trade.

Again, that's just bizarre. Are you even serious? I'll wager, again, that of the people who buy offsets and the people who criticize offsets, 98% wouldn't know an auctioned permit if it bit them on the ass. That decision's going to be made by politicians, their staffs, and their contributors. I can't imagine you seriously think the existence of a private offset market is going to have substantial influence on the shape of eventual carbon legislation.

If we ever get a U.S. cap-and-trade system, the standards will likely be adapted from the voluntary market.

Evidence? Rationale? Anything? This has all the marks of being pulled out of your a**.

Everything I've seen since my original post confirms the impression I described there. The arguments against offsets are a really, really strange mix of non sequiters and moralisms. I feel like there must be something else behind it, some kind of psychological explanation I'm missing. What is it?

grist.org

By restoring a bit of prairie and improving the soil around my home, I'm also reducing the release of CO2 into the atmosphere!

I can burn fossil fuel like there's no tomorrow! My life's work and my major hobby is one big friggin carbon offset!!!

Perhaps I should do some math to make sure... but first, I think I'll drive the scenic route home... I deserve it.

Peace!!!

You are having trouble believing I'm making this argument, where it seems so obvious to me, I having trouble understanding how you can disagree.  Campaigns like that happen all the time, more often by circumstance than by intent. For example movie stars who have and advantage running for public office, because they are  known.

One difference between cap n' trade and permit auctioning is the whole intermediate layer of markets and private red tape between the issuer of the permits the buyer. In both systems you have the initial of issuing the permits. But in cap n' trade they are deliberately issued to people who won't use them, and who will resell them -- creating this whole additional transactional burden. And the voluntary offset market mimics this effect. It gets people used to it. So when the proposal comes it will seem very familiar. Now  if you favor cap n' trade then you can shrug and say viral  marketing for can n' trade is no bad thing. But I don't see how you can not see that the affect is there; when people have dealt with offset market hear about cap n' trade, it will seem warm and familiar -- like something they have already done.

Incidentally when you say that most people you know who criticize offsets talk mainly of the voluntary market -- you know that I've written extensively about both. But if you look to the wider world, you will find whole books written criticizing CDM. I don't know any that concentrate on the voluntary markets.

The fight over offsets is ultimately down to cap n' trade vs. auctioned permits. And the voluntary market helps create a  base for whom cap n' trade will be familiar and warm and fuzzy, once that moves to the front of the agenda.

I will say this, though: somebody should come up with a character called Cap'n Trade, modeled after Cap'n Crunch, and use that for marketing. Or maybe, nodding to Gar, Cap'n Auction. Though the extra syllable is unfortunate from a marketing perspective.

grist.org

There was widespread belief in Europe that the plague was a punishment for a sinful world, not an individual punishment.

So it's not accurate to say that this (sin is personal, emissions are global) distinguishes the two things.

One way of looking at all this is to question whether you have tried to shift the burden improperly, saying "Show me the evidence that offsets are like indulgences" and then "There is none."

It's apparently such a common comment on offsets that it drives you crazy enough to write a long blast about it; I've certainly heard it from a number of people, including from those to whom I introduced the whole idea of offsets.

Even if only half the people who encounter the idea of offsets think "indulgences," then doesn't that suggest that there might be a little something more to the comparison than you (or an offset salesman) will acknowledge?

In the era of indulgences, one of most common uses was a substantial gift or endowment to pay for regular prayers, which were believed (to varying degrees, probably) to be effective--that is, rather than not sinning, the buyer paid money to a local order to have prayers said on his behalf (sometimes daily).

Depending on your beliefs about the efficacy of prayer or offsets, the comparison just doesn't seem as bizarre as you seem to suggest.

The 5% Project

Face it: the analogy rests on the unspoken equivalence of personal CO2 emissions and personal sin. I believe that this is a false and damaging equivalence, but many enviros -- yourself occasionally included -- speak as though it is valid.

BioD's got a good post about this that will go up tomorrow.

grist.org

Now what? China becomes the #1 polluter in carbon emission. Currently China does not agree with the Kyoto any more. It keeps creating global warming pointing the finger at the western world, claiming that per capita carbon emission, not carbon emission should be used as an indicator.

Guess what? The majority of Chinese are still rural farmers who do not pollute at all. The major polluters in China are state-run power plants, illegal power plants, and evil businesses.

Don't you guys see the problem? If you control the carbon emission in advanced countries, the polluting industries will move to developing countries that are very like to be corrupt dictatorships. Most of the citizens in these countries do not pollute. Dictators in these countries take advantage of per capita pollution quotas to pollute the world. Once you try to control countries like dictatorial China, dirty industries will move somewhere else, perhaps to Vietnam or even Sudan.

Since evil dictatorships like Sudan do not care about their people or the environment and they most likely have some close evil links with China, Mainland Chinese communists will rebuild their evil factories in Sudan and pollute the world as usual.

Now you want to control Sudan... and what is next? In the next 50-100 years, carbon emission will rise in double digits every year. We will be in ICE AGE by then!

Perhaps the so-called "natural scientists" should take some courses in Economics to understand what "capital mobility" means!

freehk.org | chinasick.blogspot.com | noolympics.blogspot.com

On the other hand I have heard the "indulgences" thing applied to environmental figures (like Al Gore) in an attempt to make the "hypocrisy" label stick.

When used there the "indulgences" argument is a very emotional one.

We don't care if the solar panels on your roof work, or even make sense.  We just want to see them there so that we know you are "honest" and not just "paying someone else to do it."

It would be odd if someone went into the voluntary offset business without favoring a cap-and-trade system.

I have something to confess. I am a retailer of carbon offsets and...I favor a carbon tax.

I don't really know how it all started. Originally I went into this line of work because I wanted to give SUV owners a way to feel better about themselves. It saddened me that so many drivers out there weren't able to really enjoy the off-roading capabilities of their vehicles, because they were so burdened with guilt over global warming.

Sure, the greenhouse gas reductions, investment in renewables, and policy activism were nice perqs of the job, but all that enviro stuff was pretty much gravy. My true passion was for carbon offsets as an end in themselves.

Then something odd happened. I actually began to evaluate environmental policy proposals on their merits. It didn't happen overnight. Frankly, some of those carbon tax people scared me, with their shrill, over-the-top denunciations of cap and trade legislation. Given that cap and trade and carbon tax proposals are more similar than different, and given that they share the same goals, why the need to distort, exaggerate, and mock? I also knew that Exxon Mobil favors a carbon tax. Could it be that that the taxers had a secret agenda?

But then I read somewhere that a bunch of economists -- really smart people with degrees and everything! -- think a carbon tax will be more efficient.

So here I am today. Really I just want the U.S. to pass some form of well-designed legislation that puts a price on carbon, whether a tax or a cap and trade system, as soon as possible. But if I were calling the shots -- which, as a viral marketer of offsets, I pretty much am -- I would go with a carbon tax.

www.terrapass.com/blog

It case it's not clear, the preceding post was parody. Not the part about my preference for a carbon tax (that's true) or the part about shrill attacks on cap and trade systems (that's really true) or the part about how I'd really just like to see some meaningful legislation get passed (also true). But all the other stuff.

Gar's post is so far untethered from any type of recognizable reality that I can't believe it achieved escape velocity from the ideological black hole that spawned it. The indulgence accusation is meant to apply to the CDM and JI? Legislators are going to base climate change proposals on favorable Reader's Digest coverage of the offset market? The regulated market will be based on the voluntary market and not, say, state-level initiatives? I don't really even have words.

Hey, while we're on the topic, am I the only one worried that those glow-in-the-dark light sticks are acting as viral marketing for nuclear energy?

www.terrapass.com/blog

I don't really know how it all started. Originally I went into this line of work because I wanted to give SUV owners a way to feel better about themselves. It saddened me that so many drivers out there weren't able to really enjoy the off-roading capabilities of their vehicles, because they were so burdened with guilt over global warming.

...I was pretty sure we had a parody going here, but I couldn't tell for sure where it ended. Good thing you cleared it up in your next post or all hell would be breaking loose.

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

Adam writes:  "I am a retailer of carbon offsets and..."

Gee, who knew?  I must admit this was an apparently honest exposition. I am also glad you apparently know about mass extinction.  However, it remains to be seen if your and your 'class' are sincere, and what happens in the future, if money ultimately trumps morals.  My confidence in a positive outcome is not high.  

I will confess to knowing little about offsets, cap and trade, etc., since they seem so arcane, deliberately byzantine, and so far removed from the real measures needed, as to be utterly useless.  Still, I would like to know more, so if anyone has a source for a primer I would appreciate it.

I would prefer moving away from the use of 'indulgence' as a religious term, since in that form it is arcane and useless.  Still, offsets are a clear secular indulgence to assuage guilt, as evidenced by Adam's last comment.

What Noolympics has pointed out deserves reiteration.  Multinationals will now go anywhere on the globe, aided by gobbleization, and exploit conditions/policies there.  The "giant sucking sound"  that Perot referred to going South in the 90s now goes anywhere conditions can be exploited.  

And Carbon is only one of several attractions.  Environmental policies of all kinds, governance (dictators can be easily bought--it's in their blood), cheap labor, cheap resources, uneducated citizens, cheap money , cheap land, under/off the Western RADAR--all these things make cap and trade and offsets look like vapid, cosmetic afterthoughts.  China and Sudan, and the multinationals who suck up to them, with no coincidence at all, are prime examples of avaricious exploitation.  There is indeed something narcissistic and incestuous in the relationship between government and business.

Three are those who scream "Aw, it'll hurt Bidness!!"  Well, first, "STRAW MAN!!  Second, who are THEY hurting?   Third, there are plenty of ideas available to "change" business, to make it more sustainable.  CEOs may no longer be so goddam filthy stinking rich, but hey, I don't care about them at all.  

We have to do better.  The present, let alone the future, demands it of us.

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

Gar, buddy, you gotta stop acting like "cap-and-trade" is a blanket mechanism in which polluters get their intitial credits for free.  The fact that this is something included in most proposals does not mean that's what cap-and-trade is.

Let me break it down for you.  Cap: means a cap on emissions.  Trade means allowing polluters to buy and sell credits in order to meet their regulatory requirements.  Auctioned permits, while different from and preferrable to free allocation, are still part of a cap-and-trade scheme!

Furthermore, Adam is totally right.  Any federal cap-and-trade legislation is far more likely to draw from state-level intiatives rather than the voluntary market.  This is how both the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act came about.

You have built a straw man against offsets, probably for some ideological reason, but who really knows?  If we are serious about reducing emissions then you should welcome all of the tools in our bag.  Measures to protect habitat and reduce emissions are never a bad thing - especially when they can be done voluntarily.

You can't claim with a straight face that if carbon is traded, then the polluters will change countries...doesn't something like 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from coal-fired power plants?  I hate to break it to you, but the Chinese need their electricity to stay in China...and they'll keep using coal mined in China where it's cheap, unless we all get together to make it more expensive...

Isn't solving Climate Change about making CO2 personal?

So to write, "Sin is personal. CO2 is not." is a non-starting, that avoids the argument.  The "sin" here, so to speak, is CO2.

Making CO2 personal is a way for enviros to push behavioral changes they've been seeking for decades, well before climate change came on the scene. And making it personal is one source of the immense resistance we've met trying to get action on climate change.

grist.org

We're just talking different levels of inquiry.  If CO2 isn't reducible on some level to each unique living breathing individual, human or otherwise, then how exactly do we find ourselves at this moment in history, as you write, about "reducing global CO2 emissions"?

So in that way, there's a religious-esque element here.  Debatable to be sure, but what is sin but action (I suppose thought qualifies too, but that's a different metaphysical debate).  And our CO2 challenge is a derivative of the actions of our species, which constitute the collective action of its individuals, as we progressively evolve on what is looking more and more like a classic extinction curve.  

I'm not arguing offsets here...I honestly need to study more before making any intelligent conclusions, other than my sense tells me their benefits are tenuous at best.  So there's my predisposition...

But back to CO2, of course it's personal.  How we solve the issue is global, and can stay non-personal.  If not, how would you characterize all the CO2 calculators, admonitions and measuring of CO2 footprints.  

Perhaps it's a truism to say I emit CO2.  But it is mine, and personal in that way.  To divide CO2, by simply characterizing it as a molecule, is to detach responsibility, personally (and following your reasoning to societies) from the solution.  Fact is...somebody has gotta own it, or we're in big, big trouble.

Or anyway, I think that is what a Lutheran might say.

I would rather listen to Prairie Home Companion, actually.

Here is a suggestion: Let us drop "indulgence" altogether from all future discussions of "carbon offsets."  Why?  Because nobody has a clear understanding of what indulgences are all about, and how they are applied (but JMG does an excellent job of explaining the social context).  Also, because the word is apparently merely a rhetorical weapon.

We are all on the same side, basically, no?  And we are all striving for some decent respective understanding, no?

So the moral is: Kill, delete, crush, chop henceforth all references to "indulgence," in this context.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

Is there a word for this?

Hey, Canis: you naive fool you!  

"We are all on the same side, basically, no?  And we are all striving for some decent respective understanding, no?"

.....NAW!!......

Hey, just teasing....Idealistically, yes, you are correct, but I am finding there are a lot of commercial, greed-driven interests here, suggesting we are not all entirely on the same side--depends on what "side" means.   From time to time the good comes out though, so we should foster that behavior.

I do think, while I do not like the religious connotation of 'indulgence', it still has perfectly good secular value.  And I think it applies to many who buy them, since it compensates for their laziness.  Note I am not referring to all of them.   The way some here apparently defend the buyers of offsets, I guess I would have to say many are decent.  But, the guilt component is still in play, therefore offsets are a way of assuaging the buyer's guilt.    

Gotta luv these autistic musical offset chairs!  How many offset threads in one week can there be?
Anybody heard of CONTINUITY?

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

You should consider whether a relentlessly sustained tone of shrill umbrage is the best way to reach other people. I find it exhausting to read, much less reply to.

grist.org

Hey, GreenMom: Sorry, but what you suggest is absurd.  Global exploitative companies will find governments to buy and resources to exploit and Carbon to extract and burn.  The one thing you focus on is the one thing that need not move. And even the guts of the power plant could be moved.

Hey, if, given Western conventions, your screen name married my scree name...."Green Green"!! Hah Hah!!

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

Roberts: "You should consider whether a relentlessly sustained tone of shrill umbrage is the best way to reach other people."

What the Hell difference does this make to the commercial, greed-driven interests?

Roberts: "I find it exhausting to read, much less reply to."

Then you you mustn't.  However, you might miss the observation that I constantly adjust my tone to the context.  Therefore, your charge of "relentlessly" and "shrill umbrage" reveals your own distortion, myopia and shrillness.  Regardless, I DO NOT WRITE FOR YOUR APPROVAL.  Carry on.

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

Individuals and corporations, so they can continue to release CO2,  pay other individuals and organizations to plant trees, hand out CFLs, or find some other way to reduce CO2 emissions by X tons. It doesn't really matter why. They do it... for personal reasons, easing guilt, meeting legal requirements, whatever.

So, somewhere, someone is getting paid to plant trees. Why can't the system be set up so I can get paid to restore the prairie next to my house? It should fix more CO2 than what it is replacing. Where's my financial reward? Hell... I can't even get a tax break. If it was owned by a large organization, it could be an offset project! And what about small local non-profits that are restoring natural areas. Can they turn their activity into a corporate-funded offset project? How?

Also, as I've pointed out, the work I get paid to do should eventually reduce CO2 emissions. So, why can't a program be set up that allows some mega-corporation to pump CO2 into the atmosphere in exchange for funding our research. Perhaps it is possible.

How does one become "an offset project"?

It just doesn't seem right that people can continue to pollute as long as they pay for a carbon offset, while others, using their own money and labor, are just trying to do the responsible thing... not because they have to... just trying to do what everyone should be doing.... mindful living and caring for the planet.

Hey, Sunflower:  "...while our distant generals are united in the cause to bring coal to a standstill, then kill it..."

Who would these be?  I sincerely wish there were some leaders really worthy of the title.  Just as when viewing the government, we would expect 'leadere' to have a winning record.  

Those living and active I can think of are Zinn, McKibben, Lovins, Anderson, Wilson, Chomsky, and a very few others, but most of them would scoff at being called a leader.  And even these are not very united, except very broadly (mostly in my estimation of them).  Note there are no politicians on my list.  

Most of the people I see and hear and read about  have the same affliction that Mr. Leubner (from the glory days of SNL) had: 'born without a spine'.  Or as one of Bill Moyers' guests tonight (which I highly recommend) said about the current Congress: they are invertebrates.  

So, hah hah, please cheer me and the group up.  Not that it is necessarily your burden, though.    

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

Instead, less will be mined, and power companies here will do some combination of conservation and also building more nuclear or less likely natural gas or maybe even wind (it's starting to happen a little here).  

Anyway hmm...the possibility of our screen names getting together does boggle the mind...GreenGreen
...good thing I'm happily married...

Hey, Green Mom:  Yes, what you say is true, emitted not by the multinationals but by general locales.  My point is the multinationals are mobile and they will seek the best deal possible, globally in those countries.  The "deal" includes all the ingredients: labor costs, politics, regulatory freedom, etc.  

By the way, is Coal not shipped?  Does anyone know?  It occurs to me I don't know why it would not be.  They convey it in trains all across the U.S.--VA to NC is a short trip.   A power plant I know about in Texas gets a trainload every 2 days from Montana.  They flew it in planes during the Berlin Airlift.  It is barged up and down the Mississippi and on the IntraCoastal WaterWay.   So it does have some mobility, although I have simply not heard of ocean shipping.

I wish I could feel positive about the scenario you provide, especially the time frame.  My position for years has been that we have NO time to wait.   And in any case distributed wind and PV is by far the best.  Better to pass over all the intermediate market steps and go aggressively into Wind and PV.  

I guess the screen names will have to remain forever unrequited in cyberspace--and--not that it matters--it's only a cyber moon--I am happily UNmarried!  Done there, been that.

David
Sustainability For Life

Messages done with sustainable energy, with Wind and Sun!

1. Regarding indulgences - now i know why i had to sit through a bunch of classes in college that didnt help my gpa! There really is nothing new under the sun. Those who dont learn from history are condemned to relive it (I forgot what the correcting wording is and am too lazy to look it up). Looks like we are in the middle ages all over again after reading all this.
   
2. And if in a sense we are in the middle ages, then wouldnt we want to follow ideas that functioned in the middle ages. Yes, I'm saying that maybe the next generations might learn how to reducing their sinning individually, but are we really ready for that? Do we want to just jump in to the most advanced ways, or do we want to work our way up to it. Yes, Mr. Nixon, gradualism really was realistic!
   
3. So the real question is what are we? I'd love to say that our society is full of people that are up on the amount of detail necessary to make the correct decisions, but advertising and branding has taught us it just isnt so, that humans just dont have enough time to master everything, and dont have wonderful systems for determining who has mastered things to the necessary level.
   
4. Therefore, arguing something on its merits is great for high school debate, but in the real world we have to add another dimension, that being the best you can pull off and be done with it. So, posters, just think about ordinary folks every once in a while while you decide the fate of the world...its not perfect out there, but until you cure man of all imperfections, you may have to just settle for cap and trade and be happy you got that far.