Kudos to Andy Revkin for giving some exposure to (occasional contributor) Charles Komanoff of Carbon Tax Center fame. Komanoff articulates a common fear about carbon offsets:
Charles Komanoff, an energy economist in New York, said the commercial market in climate neutrality could have even more harmful effects.
It could, by suggesting there's an easy way out, blunt public support for what will really be needed in the long run, he said: a binding limit on emissions or a tax on the fuels that generate greenhouse gases.
"There isn't a single American household above the poverty line that couldn't cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures," he said.
That latter bit is a good message, but is the fear -- that offsets will lull people into a false sense of security -- really grounded? Is there any empirical evidence for it?
From a folk psychology perspective, it seems equally plausible to me that buying offsets will whet people's appetite for action and lead them to bigger, more ambitious things. But some data would be nice.
Climate talks should not focus on China and India at Africa’s expense
Comments
View as Flat
TerraPassTom Posted 8:19 am
29 Apr 2007
Offsets are just one cookie in the cookie jar...
We asked this very question a few weeks ago on our blog (see post and comments).
This is a totally unscientific study, but anecdotally, the highlights of TerraPass members post-offset behavior include:
Clearly offset purchasers are trying to do all they can to reduce their impact, both directly and indirectly. Offsets can serve as a reminder that every day decisions are a big contributor to climate decision. For many, its just one cookie out of the cookie jar of tools to reduce their impact.
The press is in love with asking who is the holiest of the green about offsets. And there is no shortage of leaders to step forward and paint a picture of indulgent SUV drivers with an open wallet. I wonder if the critics also wag their finger when they see people recycling? Surely it is best to avoid the paper and cans in the first place, rather than "find salvation" in an energy intensive recycling process?
Of course, we accept in our society that it is not practical to live without cans and paper. The ethic, and tagline for recycling is therefore, reduce, reuse, recycle. Similarly in climate change the ethic should stress conservation as clearly preferable to offsetting and green power.
But thinking that conservation alone will solve climate change paints green leaders as supercilious zealots out of touch with both the mathematics of the problem and mainstream consumer behavior. Everyone in America, Mr. Hayes included, has an unsustainable carbon footprint. Everyone needs tools to lower it.
The challenge in mobilizing consumers to fight climate change is getting people to think differently about the big energy decisions in life. We think encouraging people to measure and manage their footprints is a step in the right direction. Offsets aren't perfect, but they are more practical than hoping impractical behavior will solve the problem.
Tom Arnold Chief Environmental Officer TerraPass
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feonixrift Posted 10:02 am
29 Apr 2007
Acting on multiple scales
"There isn't a single American household above the poverty line that couldn't cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures," he said.
Except, of course, for those who already did. And without beating a trail toward the poverty line either. I find this sort of all-inclusive statement saddening, in that it gives no praise to existent successes.
Offsets worry me because polution isn't just a global issue, it also changes a lot about quality of living within an area. I don't see a way for it to cause increased equality in polution burdens, but perhaps I'm missing something.
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Jones Posted 10:39 am
29 Apr 2007
Good temporary solution
No "data", unfortunately, but my personal observation is that offsets don't lull us into complacency. We've already got that in spades. Rather, if you look at the huge progress of the past year in societal awareness concerning climate change, and the fact that "carbon neutral" and "carbon offsets" have been some of the most visible aspects of it, then I'd have to conclude that offsets are functioning to raise awareness and empower people.
I don't think that carbon offsets have prevented a single person from going CFL or picking any of the other low-hanging fruit of energy reduction. And the vast majority of people are not going to jump head-first into the larger changes (not necessarily sacrifices, but fundamental adjustments nonetheless) that will be exceedingly helpful for combating this problem. Retrofitting one's home is not a decision one makes (or can make) overnight. Time is needed. Offsetting can fill that void, sort of, and wind up acting as a powerful gateway drug, for many...
Of course, offests are far from perfect and "carbon neutral" is anything but. This sort of calculation simply isn't possible. We're comparing apples and oranges, and it's very difficult for an individual to know when to offset and when to do it oneself. I imagine we'll hit a point where carbon offsetting no longer makes sense. But we're not there yet. We're still in the tip of the tail of the learing curve on the climate issue, and offsets are helping us along nicely, says I.
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JMG Posted 1:17 pm
29 Apr 2007
Other way around
I think offsets are problematic, but I know from experience and training in behavior change that offsets are unlikely to cause the response cited--rather, as others have noted, doing something (even just making a choice to have offsets) INCREASES the likelihood that you will then do more.
Many environmentalists have a faulty model of human behavior change in their heads--they think that you have to change peoples' whole orientation or else they won't do anything.
That's not accurate. Humans are self-justifying and self-reinforcing--that means that if you can get people do take just a single step ---and THEN REINFORCE THAT STEP and encourage others -- you can get an amazing amount of change accomplished without ever really forcing a wrenching change onto anyone or triggering their "dig in the heels" response.
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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Gar Lipow Posted 3:29 pm
29 Apr 2007
Offsets
I think the mistake you are making is you are thinking only about the affect on those who buy the offsets. (Not that this is as simple as you make it sound.)
The key is the public sees others buying offsets:
- The result is good propaganda for carbon trading in general.
- The result spreads the meme that we don't need to make infrastructure changes, that we can pay people in other nations to do it for us. It also help play into the next theme that will be used to fight doing anything against global warming: it is all China's fault!
Incidentally, let me prove y'all don't really believe what you are saying about human nature. I propose that you start encouraging people to use biodiesel or ethanol wherever possible. After all it is an easy first step they can take, and people who do this are probably the same demographic who will buy CFLs and insulate their attic. It is true that biofuels may actually hurt the environment; at best they do much much less than their proponents claim. But, as y'all argue about offsets, they are good first step which with proper praise, petting and positive reinforcement will lead to other better steps.Permalink
David Roberts Posted 4:33 pm
29 Apr 2007
Gar,
What evidence do you have that personal carbon offsetting is connected in the public's mind to Kyoto-style carbon credit trading? And what evidence do you have that if it were so connected, it would then sap all the public's will to take additional measures?
Tom offered some support for the notion that people who buy offsets go on to do other things. JMG offered a behavior change model that would explain it. You deride the model with the word "petting" (what psychologists less contemptuously call positive reinforcement), but offer no alternative model.
What I'm asking in the post is: why do people believe what you've now restated here? What evidence is there for it? Seems like this debate should move beyond competing intuitions.
grist.org
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Billhook Posted 6:54 pm
29 Apr 2007
Fraud discredits a foreseeably vital tactic
The head of the UK's largest bank, HSBC,
has not only called for the police & serious fraud office to address the offsets industry,
but was unable to find a service with satisfactory integrity for tha bank to use,
and so has started an internal scheme.
It seems to me a bit odd to suggest that getting ripped off when acting on a remote problem
makes one want to do more about it.
Rip off is to my mind a fair term,
in that neither funding non-fossil energy
nor improving energy efficiency
nor simply using less energy
saves any fossil fuel from being burned.
It is very basic economics to observe that they simply keep the price of fossil fuels low enough
for people elsewhere to afford them.
This is in itself laudable, given that de facto peak oil supply
has already arrived in poor countries,
but it has nothing to do with controlling GW.
One approach that can reduce airborne CO2 is the planting of trees,
though this too is subject to the brazen fraud of selling a delusion of "carbon neutrality".
I've graphed the carbon debt of a person paying the "CarbonNeutral Company" for this service,
which says (in small print) that trees take 60 yrs to bank the carbon.
Supposing the person has no carbon debt on the day they become a customer (BS)
and they pay to have trees planted each year of their life,
then their cumulative debt rises to about 75% of what it would have been with no tree-planting,
holds steady until their death, and then declines over 60 yrs back to neutrality.
So would anyone like to lend me $10 interest free if I guarrantee to repay them 60 yrs after I'm dead ?
That carbon banking in productive sustainable forestry may become an absolutely vital tactic in the coming years,
and one which the public can fund and raise morale on,
seems to me quite obvious.
Which means I'd vote for the full force of anti-fraud law
to be applied to those scams who now discredit the concept of carbon offsets.
Regards,
Billhook
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Billhook Posted 8:22 pm
29 Apr 2007
Addendum
The above post was done in a rush,
(as we're notching the ears of all this year's lambs today)
and needs at least a couple of clarifications.
First, the fraud that is the present offsets industry is going to be exposed wholesale -
the MSM have been pushing Green issue very hard,
and the entirely predictable next phase is tearing into fraud & hypocrisy.
Thus many people are going to feel ripped off,
and thus the issue of "a small step leading to other steps"
is a somewhat misleading over-simplification in my view.
Second, carbon banking in productive sustainable forestry
makes good sense only if it is accredited in Real Time,
that is, the carbon banked by a wood this year
is accredited for this year.
Whether the trading of future banking rights would be helpful is another issue,
but it is plainly fraudulent to claim future banking as part of present offsets.
Regards,
Billhook
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BernardBrown Posted 10:10 pm
29 Apr 2007
shaky conclusions
I don't like that leap from hearing anecdotally what a few offsetters also do to reduce GHG emissions to
"Clearly offset purchasers are trying to do all they
can to reduce their impact, both directly and indirectly."
That's a hint, not a "clearly." I don't mean to be overly picky about this, but you're resting your argument on a very shaky foundation. Maybe offsetters do other things, but maybe they just have a few trees planted to help them feel better about their decision to buy the Hummer. At least based on the above, we still don't know.
Bernard Brown
Change the world one lunch at a time. Find out how at www.pbjcampaign.org
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Energy745 Posted 10:22 pm
29 Apr 2007
Reduce 25% in 6 months
I work as an energy efficiency expert for industry, and I know how hard it is to reduce energy use.
I am not so sure about residential, but I have gone through my house to look for savings that have a payback. There are no such projects. All energy savings projects I studied have a net financial loss.
Not to say there can not be savings, but all savings require a change in how a person uses energy, for example: keeping the house colder in the winter and warmer in the summer, buying a small TV, not a plasma, buying a smaller house, turning off the A/C. Unfortunately making lifestyle changes are much more difficult than technology changes. People work hard for their money and want to spend it on stuff. Secondly people have this feeling that they are a sucker if they sacrifice when others don't. There is a fear that your neighbor will come over to your house and say "Nice tiny TV, thanks for keeping energy prices down so I can run my 65 inch super XLT monster video system. You dumb schumck."
You can talk about a 25% reduction all you want but without being a sucker there is no way to reduce energy use.
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dannychivers Posted 10:25 pm
29 Apr 2007
Offsets Schmoffsets
It's interesting seeing this debate starting to come to the fore amongst environmental activists in the US. Here in the UK, it's been raging for a while - check out this article by (you guessed it) George Monbiot:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/10/19/selling-indulg ...
Or, if you're REALLY interested, this special edition of the New Internationalist magazine:
http://www.newint.org/issues/2006/07/01/
In my view, whether or not offsetting lulls people into complacency is less important than the fact that it doesn't actually work - at least not in the timescales that we need to tackle climate change. As the inestimable Merrick points out in his Bristling Badger blog:
"Your emissions happen now. A ton saved today is very different to a ton saved over a few years. The emission is doing damage in the time between emission and absorption. If we keep offsetting a day's emissions over a period of years, we can never catch up.
"So, if it is to be a real offset, it'd have to save the emissions in the same timeframe as they're released.
"If we want to offset a return flight from London-Malaga, we could give Climate Care money to dish out low-energy light bulbs in poor areas of South Africa. To offset 0.75 tonnes in the two hours of our actual emission, that'd be about 70,000 low-energy light bulbs. That's about £120,000 for the offsets.
"When someone comes to me with a receipt of that kind for their flight, then we'll start talking about the injustice of letting the rich do whatever they can pay for."
There's plenty more of that at http://www.bristlingbadger.blogspot.com/
All of the research I've done on offsetting has convinced me that it's a huge distraction. It's yet another way of propping up business-as-usual with little real climate benefit, and is delaying the major social and economic shifts that we really need to be getting on with, like, quite fast now, you know?
Just imagine if everyone who bought an offset instead donated that money to campaigners tackling the root causes of climate change around the world - and didn't pretend that it had somehow made their own carbon emissions disappear. Or better yet, imagine if they reduced their own emissions as far as possible, then went out and campaigned for the economic and social changes needed to get rid of the rest, rather than pretending that they can pay someone else to make them go away.
Hey, a boy can dream.
******
Danny
http://adaisythroughconcrete.blogspot.com
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amazingdrx Posted 11:11 pm
29 Apr 2007
Offsets suck
And so do carbon taxes. Suck the political energy right out of this energy re-evolution.
Are they as bad as ethanol? Yep. Go electric or stay home.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Werdna Posted 1:18 am
30 Apr 2007
Making the market safe for offsets
Danny, you make an excellent comment that if we pay to offset what is emitted now by promising to do something in the future, then we never know if that promise will be kept (or to what extent it will be kept). I haven't read the Monbiot articles you linked to (but I plan to).
My response is this, though. I would bet that a good deal of those "promises" will be kept. For example, if your offset pays to install wind power in some region. And the "promise" is that your money will offset X tons of CO2 in Y years. An earthquake might destroy the windmill in Y-1 years, or any number of other things will break the promise.
However, some carbon has been offset. What percentage, though? In the small scale, it is random, but in the large scale we can amortize and come up with a pretty good idea that if you pay $100 to offset X tons in Y years, it is really (on average) going to be X-1 tons.
My point is that I don't think that the offset business is fundamentally flawed, but just that it is all about making a safe, regular market that is transparent and people can feel confident that they actually get what they pay for. It will be complicated, but there are other markets that have similar features (think of the futures market for grains, etc).
We're not there yet. I still think there is huge benefits for the offset market, but only if governments and industry together help to monitor the market and make it really work before bad press can kill it.
Offsets in and of themselves can never be the whole solution, but as many others have posted, it can be part.
Andrew Eisenberg
The gateway project is wrong---http://www.liveableregion.ca/
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JMG Posted 3:17 am
30 Apr 2007
A use for offsets
Let's come down out of the clouds a bit, and consider an example of where offsets seem to be just the thing.
I go to a YMCA gym here in Springfield (where the Simpsons live) and find that the 1920s Y building is just groaning with energy waste. I'm working on persuading the Y building manager to invest in serious lighting and conservation upgrades, but of course the problem is that the Y is not flush with capital. They're a social service agency, and they have a habit of using any excess cash to fund scholarships for kids who couldn't otherwise afford to attend at all. Not the choice I'd make, maybe, but it's hard to argue with it.
Seems to me that people plugging their $5-$10 a month into offsets helps provide the heedless capital (heedless of minimum required return) needed to do this.
Now, I'm not saying that we should have to use heedless capital--fact is, the building is an energy pig, and thus the rate of return on investment probably leads to payoff in under five years, so a "Pay As You Save"(R) system should work great for any investor.
Problem is, in these waning days of Empire, one of the nastiest side effects of USA Carnie Capitalism ("Step right up, something for nothing right here! Step right up!") is that all supposedly solid and sober investors are refusing to consider anything that doesn't have a payback horizon of a year or--for the really strategic thinkers--two. You have to find a "socially responsible investor" to fund projects that were once the bread and butter of the lending industry because they showed a solid profit without requiring extraordinary risk.
Gresham's Law ("Bad money drives out good") applies to project selection too--corporate managers with stock option compensation daily reject environmentally and financially worthwhile projects because the financial ROI, while positive, is not nearly as high as for environmentally destructive projects.
So, yes, I see a use for offsets, as a generator of patient capital that is willing to look past the "anemic" return on the first bottom line (anemic being considered anything more than 2 year payback) and to fund projects that serve the triple bottom line. Saving energy at my Y would produce a positive financial, social, and environmental return.
What I hope we will see is the birth of local offset funds, kind of like South Shore Bank in Chicago, a place where people put their money because they want a decent return (measured against historical) that also helps their communities instead of helping destroy them. I imagine (off the top of my head) that every city big enough to be defined as a Metro area (335 or so) in America has tons of conservation opportunities that would pay back in seven or ten years and then provide an enduring positive contribution. Wall St. (and, alas, credit unions, which are becoming more and more indisinguishable from their banking competitors) seems to have little appetite for funding these projects, so perhaps we'll just have to build an alternative system, and carbon offsets would be the ideal source of capital.
My $0.02 anyway, your mileage may vary.
Note that I am not suggesting using offsets to fund, carbon sequestration, or projects that are going to happen anyway but that might be shown to have a carbon reducing effect.
"An optimist is someone who thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is someone who is afraid that the optimist is right."
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Energy745 Posted 4:46 am
30 Apr 2007
JMG
There are many companies out there which will finance a project at a 15% ROI. So, let's say you run a company and want to put in a new heating system with a payback of 20%, but capital is short and there are investments to be made in your core business with ROI's of 30 and 40 percent, then you would not do the heating project.
This is where third party financing comes into play, the third party gives you the capital, or installs the heating system(there are many variations) and is paid out of the savings. This type of system is common, of course in the case of the 'Y' this could be done but the project is a little small, and I am sure the Y's credit is a little shakey.
With an offset scheme you could say that money from offsets could be used where normal capital pays too small a return. This way you could finance crappy projects with an ROI from 0 to 15%. Of course a tax on energy has the same effect; by artificially raising the price of energy you increase the ROI of projects. The tax has the advantage of making sure the best projects attract capital first and raises government revenue. The down side of energy taxes is also obvious, raising the price for all goods, reducing exports, increasing the burden of the poor etc.
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Engineer Posted 6:57 am
30 Apr 2007
Utility assistance?
http://www.cityutilities.net/conserve/overview.htm
Not great (capped at $5,000), but will reduce out of pocket somewhat.
I've had some success with cash short agencies (schools, in particular) by suggesting that instead of a full blown retrofit project, they replace their stock of replacement bulbs and ballasts (assuming you're talking mostly about lighting opportunities) with T8/electronic, then any time a bulb needs to be replaced, retrofitting that entire fixture.
Their incremental cost is a lot lower this way, but it does take a long time to make much progress.
Common sense is an oxymoron...
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Gar Lipow Posted 8:02 am
30 Apr 2007
cost of carbon taxes
>The tax has the advantage of making sure the best projects attract capital first and raises government revenue. The down side of energy taxes is also obvious, raising the price for all goods, reducing exports, increasing the burden of the poor etc.
That down side can be mitigated by dividing the revenues from that tax equally among the population. Your total income rises by an amount equal to the increase in your cost of living. But energy is now a higher percent of your expenditures than before--which give both you and anyone selling stuff to you containing embedded energy to lower that energy cost.
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Gar Lipow Posted 8:03 am
30 Apr 2007
Offsets
David--the idea that lying or misleading people is a good strategy for moving them long term in your direction is an interesting one. I'd say the burden of proof on that one is yours.
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