Guardian Unlimited
January 2007
WarningCARBON OFFSETTING is a minefield. On the one hand it looks easy to wipe clean your carbon slate with a few clicks of the mouse. On the other, the offset business is a booming, unregulated commercial industry shunned by some environmentalists and even labelled mere greenwashing.
The idea at least is straightforward. Carbon offsetting allows people who do pollute to reduce the impact of that by paying someone else not to pollute. For example, I fly to Sydney for a holiday and produce five-and-a-half tonnes of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. So I pay £40 to a carbon-offset company, which converts a school in India from gas-powered lamps to solar, thus stopping that school from burning fossil fuels for life.
However, this can be deceptively simple. "Carbon offsetting is not a cure," says the Department for the Environment (Defra). It is instead a "useful element" in addressing climate change - "the most important issue facing the global community", according to Tony Blair.
It can help in several ways, says Defra. It can "raise awareness" about our own impact on climate change. When done in a "robust and responsible way" it can lead to a "reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions", the main greenhouse gas. And it can lead to investment in green technologies "across entire regions" thus "further reducing climate-change impact".
However, Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, doesn't agree. To him carbon-offset schemes are, "a smokescreen used to avoid real measures to tackle climate change."
He says: "We urgently need to cut our emissions, but offsetting schemes encourage individuals, businesses and governments to avoid action and carry on polluting."
Carbon offsetting, he says, "Should be a measure of last resort, after steps have been taken to cut emissions." On that he and the government agree. Defra points out that "the most appropriate action is to reduce emissions".
By that they mean insulating your home, switching to a green electricity supplier, using energy efficiently, taking the bus or cycling instead of driving, going by train instead of plane and eating locally-sourced food (less air miles). Only then should you be thinking about offsetting your emissions.
However, the reality is that these changes to our lifestyle happen over time, we still might be required to fly to New York on business, or fly to Sydney for a friend's wedding and so in the short-term, offsetting is the only way we have of ensuring that our actions don't continue to contribute to climate change.
However, there are different types of schemes and offset "credits", multiple companies (and they are pretty much all profit-motivated companies), and no regulation. The industry in the UK is forecast to grow from £60m in 2006 to £300m in 2009. (Defra)
The regulation at least is being addressed. In January the government announced proposals for a voluntary standard for carbon offsetting. The aim of the code - to be launched later this year - is to educate the public about offsetting, increase confidence in the industry, set a high standard for offset companies and - this bit's important - encourage credit types that are "robust and verifiable".
The "robust and verifiable" bit is important because there are many different types of carbon-offset scheme and sometimes it is hard to see the wood for the trees, so to speak. In the 1990s it was thought planting trees to act as carbon sinks was a good idea. Since then the science has come under scrutiny and tree-planting schemes have become discredited because of their social and environmental impact - planting thousands of hectares of non-native but fast-growing eucalyptus has displaced local people and damaged indigenous forests in parts of Africa, for example.
Other schemes, which concentrate on replacing fossil fuel use with renewable energy - wind, wave or solar - are much better. The important thing, says Friends of the Earth, "is not to simply provide renewable energy to those people who had no access to energy before". That wouldn't be offsetting, that would just be buying someone a solar panel.
The government wants the carbon-offset industry to sign up to using regulated carbon credits. Certified emission reductions (CERs), EU allowances (EUAs) and emission reduction units (ERUs) are the three most robust as they are part of wider, inter-governmental trading schemes like the Kyoto protocol.
And regulation will make it easier to find a scheme that is making a genuine difference to the global level of emissions. There are plenty of good schemes out there and for those seeking to reduce their climate impact, carbon offsets, along with personal carbon reductions, provide an important solution to global warming.
0 comments:
Post a Comment