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Oldies but goodies
Patrick McCully has a great feature in The Guardian about some of the problems with offsets. (No single article can tackle all of them.)
The points are pretty standard:
Ho freaking hum, right?
Meanwhile, the world keeps burning. Every ton of offset-enabled coal power makes our climate a little sicker.
Gar Lipow, a long time environmental activist and journalist with a strong technical background has spent years immersed in the subject of efficiency and renewable energy. He has written extensively on the economics of solving the global warming, and why pricing externalities (though important) cannot be the main driver of such solutions.
His on-line reference book compiling information on technology available today, “No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming”, is available at http://www.nohairshirts.com.
His articles on the economics and politics of solving the climate crisis have been published in Z magazine and a number of small journals.
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Patrick McCully Posted 9:50 am
22 May 2008
The report also has an essay by Gristmill's Tom Athanasiou. Its at internationalrivers.org/node/2826.
[And note that the Guardian screwed up the intro to my story - the World Bank does NOT administer the CDM as is stated. A UN secretariat in Bonn does.]
Patrick
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JMG Posted 11:49 am
22 May 2008
The bottom line is this: future reductions in emissions --- from wind turbines, or what have you --- cannot possibly arrive in time to rectify the damage done by the present emissions being "offset." It was a nice dream, but with CO2 at 390 and rising fast, there's no way that offsets help us reach 350.
A significant fraction of CO2 emitted will still be in the atmosphere after 1000 years; a huge chunk will still be there in 100 years -- and that is presuming that the oceans keep accepting it at the current rate (anyone see the scary story on the increase in acid in deepwater upwellings today?), which seems unlikely.
It's time for us to recognize that, like agrofuels, offsets are just another Siren song to lure us to our doom on the rocks of the island called "Business as Usual."
The 5% Project
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