Carbon offsetting

[the_lady_lily]

For those of you interested in such things, a report has recently been published whose purpose is to rate thirty vendors of carbon offsets as a guide to consumers.

However, on the Terrablog, Adam has made a highly critical response to the validity of this report's conclusions, including some general comments about the fact that the report's authors have a vision of how the carbon offset industry 'should' be run; the eight vendors identified as the top providers all concur with this vision. (It looks like there will be an interesting debate in the comments.)

This is especially interesting given the recent flow of debate about the microfinance/microcredit industry, and the conflicting business ideologies there. In microcredit, however, the field is large enough for different people to work in different ways. I suspect that in carbon offsetting the same doesn't apply - after all, either it works effectively or it doesn't.

I should point out that I plan to offset all my future flights, probably with Terrapass, and am planning to offset my energy consumption at home as soon as I've got the disposable income to do it; when I return to the UK I'll switch to a UK company. I've also not waded through the report yet, although I plan to do so as a relief from reading about freedmen at some point today.

Comments

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

And the fluffy side of the carbon industry finally starts bitchin' about each other. It's probably some kind of coming-of-age thing.

However, I'm quite pleased to read it, because I was genuinely wondering where the best place for private offset purchase was (and have a strong bias against simple reforestry, chemical disintegration and most bovine byproduct processing mechanisms). Thanks for pointing to it.

The trouble with generating carbon offsets is that there are a zillion ways to do it and it's difficult to assess their relative impacts. The UNFCC, which administers the CDM, spends most of its time arguing about whether to accept new methodologies and almost none of its time validating projects, which annoys the people trying to build and finance the projects (who not philanthropists). I suspect that bypassing this bureacracy is half the reason there is a voluntary credit market in Europe.

I agree with Adam that the report could do with not skimming over validation quite as briskly, and seems to put too much weight on customer education about why they should buy offsets. Surely customer education on climate change is just sales pitch for these companies?

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

I was quite pleased the report gave offsetters in different countries, actually - I had no idea of who the 'players' were as far as the UK was concerned, so this will give me somewhere to come back to (althought by then it may have been superceded, which I hope will be the case, by a report with less questionable methodology).

May I take it from the last line of your comment that you popped your head into the debate forum over there as well? ;)

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Interesting, especially to see what a variety of offsetting projects there are. I'm afraid I'd had a stereotype of them all involving planting forests, which has the problem of impermenancy.

From a quick reading of these things, additionality seems to be a key concern, which is a very hard thing to assess, because you're dealing with a complex, constantly changing system.

Example. You pay for a small-scale renewable energy project in the 3rd World. Great! This has additional development benefits. Great! The people benefitting from this get better off. Great! They buy a car which they wouldn't have been able to afford were it not for your offset. Oops. Well, great that they can afford to buy a car, but unless there's an overall global cap, and where paying for emissions is compulsory, then you cannot guarantee that reductions gained in one place are not going to pop up somewhere else. The only sort of thing I can think of that couldn't have this sort of problem is the better (more permanent) sequestration type projects, where you're clearly taking some CO2e out of the system, and no other part of the system is being touched.

Nonetheless, it is likely that most of these schemes are creating at least some benefit, that not all of your offsets are themselves being offset by the law of unintended consequences. Perhaps for safety's sake one should aim to offset by 150%, income permitting.

Anyway, thanks for this, I think I shall have to give this a serious go.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

I know, I always thought the carbon credits thing hadn't quite got off the ground and was quite surprised to discover a financial market already happily trading in them.

Glad to have raised some awareness :)

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

My firm was instrumental in setting up that market, and is carbon neutral itself, which is no small achievement in a firm with something like 70 offices in 36 countries. It's one of the things I'm proud of about working here.

[pavanne.livejournal.com]

The idea of funding small-scale renewable energy projects in non-Annex I countries is partly to encourage their energy infrastructure to develop along the lines of distributed generation, rather than the inefficient and fossil-fuel-heavy centralised system we have (and probably ought to be moving away from). So while it's true that increasing prosperity will probably increase emissions, there could be long-term environmental benefits.

The trouble with sequestration by forestry is that there's a tendency to grow monocultures of fast-growing species, which are not very biodiverse and have little merit beyond locking up the carbon as long as they stand. The trouble with geological carbon sequestration is that it's basically sticking CO2 in the ground and hoping it stays there (nobody is very sure whether this hope is justified).

Um, sorry, this is shop talk for me - the reason I replied on the blog (which didn't take my name for some reason) was so as not to clutter up this lj...

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

Um, sorry, this is shop talk for me - the reason I replied on the blog (which didn't take my name for some reason) was so as not to clutter up this lj...

I only realised I had a specialist reading when you commented, and I have to say it's very interesting to have the opinion of someone slightly better versed in this field than I am. Clutter away!

Have you been following the Radio 4 series Planet Earth Under Threat? They've not mentioned the monocultures yet, but it might turn up at some point...

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I would certainly consider funding such projects to be entirely a good thing, both from an environmental and a developmental viewpoint. What I'd be not so sure of is whether one can have any degree of confidence in any estimate of the magintude of net long-term reduction of emmisions resulting from the project compared to the baseline.

Which is not to say that offseting is not a good idea, rather that ultimately it needs to be combined with a global C&C-based capping agreement. But I imagine you'd probably agree on that.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this reminder - I've been meaning to offset our household carbon emissions for some time, and have now done so.

[the-lady-lily.livejournal.com]

I feel all good and conscience-raising now :)