Comments dannychivers has made

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.comOn Dueling assumptions posted 2 years, 7 months ago 18 Responses

Don't forget about the locals!

Interesting thread, but I'd take the issue over land rights a bit further. We need to be very careful that we, as activists in the wealthy world, aren't arguing about what high-level economic policies "we" need to put in place to "save the rainforests" without involving the people who live there. Indigenous peoples' organisations and local environmental groups around the world are already mobilising on this issue, and directly challenging the loggers and plantation companies on the ground;  we should be doing all we can to support their efforts, and ensuring that their voices are included in policy-making on this issue.

All too often, we fall into the habit of seeing these issues purely from our own perspective, and forgetting that millions of people in the Global South are also fighting the same battles for justice and a clean environment - but in far more dangerous, difficult and immediate conditions. We need to find ways to link up with, and both support and learn from the (often successful) struggles of grassroots activists all over the world. What's going on out there is actually really exciting and is one of the things that gives me real hope for the future. The people are not going to give up their lands and livelihoods without a fight; we should be supporting that fight, because ultimately it's the same as our own.

You can find more information on local struggles against biofuel plantations and rainforest destruction at: http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/

I met grassroots activists from all over the world at the World Social Forum in January, and then wrote a summary of the main things I learned there: http://adaisythroughconcrete.blogspot.com/2007/04/and-onl ...

DxOn How to save the last carbon sinks posted 2 years, 7 months ago 14 Responses

All-Consuming

Hmmm...interesting article, but it does miss some key points about the flaws inherent in trying to change the world through ethical consumption.

For example: the more money you have, the more you can consume, which means that relying on ethical consumption as our main way of having a voice gives more a much louder voice to the wealthy than to the poor. It also relies on companies being completely transparent and honest about all of their supply chains (they rarely are), and about consumers having the time and energy to process enormous amounts of information about everything we buy (we rarely do). Surely it's better to get laws passed that stop the bad products from being made in the first place, rather than relying on companies to tell us which ones are bad, or relying on campaigners to do huge amounts of research and then communicate it to millions of shoppers?

Although Steffen does make the point that changing consumer habits can only ever provide a "nudge" to the system, we still need to follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion and state very clearly: We Need More Political Action. The changes we need within are societies are pretty enormous, and we're not going to make them happen by  buying different products (or even by buying less). Slavery wasn't abolished by people buying less sugar.

I'd strongly recommend a recent issue of the New Internationalist magazine, which had several very good articles on this topic; you can read it here:

http://www.newint.org/features/2006/11/01/keynote/

DxOn Steffen makes good points posted 2 years, 8 months ago 10 Responses

Fun With Numbers

Hello. It just so happens that the place where I work (a small but perfectly-formed Eco-Footprinting and carbon auditing organisation) has been doing a lot of research into flights vs. ships lately.

The main, non-world-shattering finding is: you have to count everything that's relevant, and you have to make sure you're comparing the right things to each other. When you do this, flying stuff around that could be shipped (or produced locally...or not produced at all) is environmental lunacy.

As several people have already pointed out, to find the most efficient form of transport you have to look at CO2 per tonne of freight moved a certain distance, or CO2 per passenger moved a certain distance. If you're looking at the transport of goods, you have to be sure to include the impacts of packaging (some foods need enormous amounts of the stuff for long journeys) and refrigeration (ditto), which a recent and oft-cited study of the shipping of foods from New Zealand to the UK conveniently excluded. Of course, to be fair, you also have to compare the costs of, say, shipping a pineapple from South America to growing it in a huge heated greenhouse in the UK or (gasp) eating fewer pineapples.

Locally grown food eaten out of season via storage in big freezers can have a bigger carbon footprint than foods shipped a short distance. Some high-speed passenger ferries produce almost as much CO2 as short-haul flights. And don't get me started on the embodied energy of manufactured goods...

It's all so complicated that I'm increasingly coming to believe that the focus for policy MUST be upstream, at the carbon tax end of things. It's much, much easier (and cheaper) to count how much fossil fuel we're taking out of the ground than to try to account for every single carbon emission associated with a particular product, process, or organisation. Focusing on the emissions also opens the door (as we have seen) to costly and confusing trading schemes (such as EU ETS), with the rules written in favour of the polluters (http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/environment ...) that rely on labyrinthine carbon accounting mechanisms and corporate self-reporting, not to mention the explosion in dodgy carbon offsetting schemes.

We know what we need to do. We need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground. I think it's worth focusing on that from time to time.

Phew. Rant over.On Lessons on getting the numbers straight posted 2 years, 8 months ago 15 Responses