Send your question to Umbra!
Q. Dear Umbra,
What does a carbon offset do today for the planet? It seems to me like these vehicles are more for our guilty conscience than for real change. What do you think?
Ingrid G.
Chicago, Ill.
A. Dearest Ingrid,
Get involved in the climate fight—become a Climate Citizen today.I am about to leave carbon offsets behind, but I want to use your letter to do two things: clarify a comment I made in Monday’s column, then step up on my cap-and-trade soapbox.
First: I got a little too extreme on Monday what with averring that voluntary personal offsets did not “negate” our actual emissions. It is true that they don’t magically erase the nasties you emit. However, if you have chosen a solid, verified provider and your money is going toward projects that would not otherwise exist (again, that’s called “additionality”), and the offsetter is accurately counting the tons of carbon removed by the project ... if all those terms are met, the offset does keep an amount of carbon equivalent to your real emissions out of the atmosphere.
However! As I’ve said before, the voluntary offset market is frustrating because it has no overarching entity determining the quality of proffered products. Hence it seems suspicious, to you and to others. For this reason and many more, we need a national cap and trade program.
And that brings us to my second—but actually primary—purpose today: to emphasize that if we get a decent national cap-and-trade program going, all this voluntary offset stuff will be less urgent. The voluntary system, which is a passel of organizations patching together divergent methods, does not equal a well-planned national scheme with a target, a proven methodology, and rigorous accounting. It’s great that individuals have an interest in creating and buying into small-scale offset projects. But it’ll be even better when we have a national system that forces industry and hence consumers to internalize the cost of carbon.
The national system will not be perfect. But we will all be working together to reduce our global footprint, and reducing the chance that our footprint will be wiped out by giant waves from rising seas. It won’t just be those of us with a guilty conscience who are trying to build an alternative energy system.
We need a decent cap-and-trade bill, and our politicians need to know that we want one and are willing to be part of the U.S. Stop Global Warming In Its Tracks Team. Contact your elected representatives and let them know how you feel—visit our Climate Citizens section for tips on getting started.
Repetitively,
Umbra
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Comments
View as Flat
amazingdrx Posted 9:16 am
14 Oct 2009
The trade part of CnT takes some sort of comprehensive financial market reregulation. That would take some sort of comprehensive campaign finance reform, ie., complete public financing, no more "contributions" from lobbyists.
What would the cap side of CnT take? The same reforms, plus some sort of way to make the cap very hard to adjust. When a denier/delayer administration and/or congress takes hold, caps would simply be relaxed. Back to zero progress, but once again as with personal offsets, an excuse to continue guzzling gas and other fossil fueled energy products.
The guilt reduction/quietism objection to offsets is difficult to surmount.
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wolfger Posted 12:06 pm
14 Oct 2009
some efforts to stem CO2 creation, call them offsets or whatever are very effective.
When considering supporting efforts to reduce CO2 production one should be aware that one can either support cleaner power sources or one could help reduce the future number of generators of CO2. Consider that of the 200 million annual births globally, that around 70 million are unwanted, which is close to the annual increase in global population. For every birth voluntarily prevented, the generation of around 1500 tons of CO2 are prevented in the developed world. In the less developed world around 20 tons of CO2 are prevented. Family planning education and ready availability of birth control have been shown to be the most effective ways to prevent unwanted births even in poor countries. The Optimum Population Trust estimates that
"The $7 cost of abating a tonne of CO2 using family planning compares with $24 for wind power, $51 for solar, $57-83 for coal plants with carbon capture and storage, $92 for plug-in hybrid vehicles and $131 for electric vehicles."
http://www.optimumpopulation.org/reducingemissions.pdf
Supporting Planned Parenthood or similar organizations will achieve this. One could also consider supporting educational organization such as the Population Media Center which creates very effective radio soap programs to achieve broadcast education of family planning in less developed countries.
http://www.populationmedia.org/
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thollandpe Posted 3:11 pm
14 Oct 2009
The fact is that there are legitimate offsets and they can have a legitimate function. And of course their function, effect will gel when a mandatory national framework is in place (and choosing among them will be simplified too). It's high time we had that framework and we should support making it.
But in the meantime there are valid offsets and we should support them too, like the REC's offered by North Carolina utilities.
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