There’s rampant green one-upmanship at my school gate. One mother confides her struggle to stretch an electric cable through the window to plug in her G-Whiz car to the mains, revealing in one stroke that she has both the cash to own a second car and the conscience to make it electric. But she is trumped by another who is “offsetting” all her family holidays, forever. Cue awed silence. In 2007 class snobbery has given way to competitive eco-atonement.
This is the year in which we will grapple with myriad schemes offering green redemption. We will find that some are not quite what they seem.
Did Mrs Offset know how her money was being spent to compensate for the carbon dioxide generated by her flights? Was she planting trees to absorb the CO2, or helping to reduce someone else’s emissions? She didn’t know. The act of writing the cheque was enough to absolve her guilt. Carbon offsetting is easily portrayed as the 21st-century equivalent of the papal indulgences sold in the 16th century by the Catholic Church. Then, you could wash away whatever sins you had committed by handing over a commensurate amount of lolly. Now you can chuck £10 at lastminute.com to offset your trip to NY, or give £5.85 to Carbon Clear to offset two and a half years of disposable nappies. I bet indulgences didn’t come that cheap. But the risk is the same: that by paying up we will feel free to keep on sinning.
Redemption is elusive. Planting trees turns out to be fraught with difficulty, mainly because the amount of carbon that a tree can absorb depends on its age and on the soil. If you could be sure that you were planting a tree where there had never been one before, where the soil carbon was depleted as a result, and if you could be sure that it would be permanent, you could rest easy. But this is rare. Trees can also burn down, releasing all that nasty carbon dioxide, like the mango plantation planted in India by the band Coldplay. They were hanging out in the Learjet, thinking their world tours were “neutralised”, when all they had neutralised was their halo.
We can’t plant our way out of climate change, because we would need to plant a forest bigger than Dorset each year to equalise Britain’s annual CO2 emissions. So attention is turning to renewable energy. You can buy offsets that help to build biogas digesters in India, install hydroelectric power in Bulgaria or distribute energy-efficient light bulbs in Jamaica. Helping other people to use cleaner energy supplies is eminently sensible. But, like all foreign aid, it is hard to verify some of these small projects, whether they would have happened anyway, and whether they actually increase energy demand.
The Government is working on a benchmark of quality. But for most of us, the only way to be sure we have permanently removed a ton of carbon from the atmosphere is to turn down the thermostat or drive less or buy some solar panels. That is harder work than writing a cheque, but it is real.
This is not to say that offsetting is pointless. On the contrary, it provides an enormously important way to help individuals to measure their environmental impact. It also offers a powerful tool to employees who want to make their companies more responsible. Once offsets appear as a cost on the balance sheet, it is harder for the finance director to ignore climate change.
M&S, which announced this week its intention to go carbon neutral, was right to emphasise that offsetting must be a last resort, not a panacea. Its priority is to squeeze every last drop of carbon out of its supply chain. If you accept the recommendations of the Stern review, which are in line with mainstream science, it is impossible to believe that the drastic cuts in carbon emissions it calls for can be made without some fairly drastic changes in national behaviour. All government departments now offset emissions. But walk down any street in Whitehall at night and most still have their lights on.
What most environmentalists have dismissed as “blood money” is also a dramatic demonstration of conscience. Offsetting is something that individuals feel they can do while they wait and wait for government to take a lead. About 1.5 million Britons offset flights last year, a figure that will grow as more schemes become available. About 10 per cent of lastminute.com’s customers are using its offset. That is a substantial figure for a brand new scheme that is entirely voluntary and based on a concept that is hard to grasp. This should give timid politicians pause for thought. For it is a rough indication of how much people value the planet that they are prepared to write cheques to organisations they have never heard of, with so little idea of what they do.
A charity called Pure has added a new twist by buying up the pollution credits that are traded on emissions exchanges. It then “retires” them from the market. If enough credits are retired — and it would have to be an awful lot — this would eventually raise the price of carbon. This in turn would put more pressure on polluters to clean up their act.
The idea is brilliant. But it is also flawed. Pure has been invented because most of Europe’s governments have handed out too many carbon credits to polluting companies. The French are still embarrassed to disclose how many they gave. The problem is political. We can all donate to Pure, to buy up credits. But unless governments also ratchet up the pressure, we are nowhere.
2007 is set to be the year of green conscience. It must not also become the year of disillusion. Mrs Offset will not save the planet. But her cheque is a call on government to get it right.
As this is a carbon life-form planet, what happens when we all drop dead. What happens to the carbon? Is it a zero sum game? Carbon offsets are pure scam, St Al Gore of Green's scheme is the easiest to refute.
Desmond Taylor, Houston, USA Texas
Build nuclear power stations, sufficient for all electricity and hydrogen to run all cars on fuel cells.
Amosphere will clear pretty soon.
H. Ristlaid, San Jose, USA CA