REUSABLE SHOPPING BAG PRINCESS
October 27, 2009 - 11:47am
Carbon offsetting: A flight of fancy
So! You’re about to slide your credit card to the travel agent or hit the “Confirm this flight” button on Air Canada’s website. Knowing what we all know about carbon pollution makes it hard not to feel guilt along with excitement about your awaiting adventure. Fortunately, we can all feel better by purchasing carbon credits to offset the flight.
Or can we?
Purchasing carbon offsets, a common option for travelers nowadays, involves paying a small fee (the longer your flight, the bigger the fee) that goes toward environmental programs and initiatives. In essence, it’s putting a monetary value on the act of polluting our common air space. If you’re indulging in an international flight, your carbon tax is meant to restore the balance in the universe by making another public space somewhere else a little bit greener.
Sound good? Well, let’s think about it for a minute. Say I’m standing on the corner of Yonge and Bloor, and some chain smoking dude exhales a heavy stream of smoke directly into my face. Say he then gives me $5 to make up for it. Even if I take that $5 and donate it to The Lung Association or The Canadian Cancer Society, the damage to my lungs has already been done. It doesn’t matter if he writes me a check for $10,000 per lung – my lungs are now a little less healthy than they were before he made the choice to pollute them. If he really cared about my health, he would’ve abstained from making that choice in the first place.
This is a well-written and thoughtful article - but one quibble.
Offsetting is not "putting a monetary value on the act of polluting our common air space." This implies that the purchase of an offset is equivalent to giving compensation for harm (like the $5 given to the smoker's victim in the author's analogy). This is incorrect.
Rather, offsetting is a way of financially supporting an activity - a forest in Gabon, a wind farm in Vietnam, a methane combustion facility in Mexico, or whatever - that reduces emissions in a quantity equal to what was generated in the first place. By doing so it neutralizes the original act of pollution and restores the status quo ante.
Remember: from a climate change perspective, the number that matters the most (and perhaps the only number that matters at all) is the aggregate level of global emissions. Offsetting is one way - not the only way, but one way - of making it easier and faster for the world to reduce this number.
Thanks to the author for getting us thinking about this issue.
Hi R!
Thanks for your comment. While I agree with you that a carbon offset supporting a forest in Gabon or a wind farm in Vietnam is definitely a worthwhile endeavour, I have doubts that doing this absolutely neutralizes carbon emissions from flying. Specifically, how do we measure this comparison? i.e. How can we equate airplane output with say, tree output? There seem to be many confounding factors that make it difficult to know for sure that our green contribution has equaled our plane's emissions. Eg. Planting a tree initially creates more oxygen, yes, but later on when that tree dies, the process of decaying emits carbon into the atmosphere. In that case, the results of the comparison would likely change depending on which period of time in the tree's lifespan you were studying. Thus, I question their reliability.
With hope, the global environmental goal is ideally not to maintain a status quo, but to improve upon that status quo - and this can only be accomplished if we go above and beyond simply correcting damage (if it fact our actions are correcting it). If I'm trying to save money, yes I can put $20 into my bank account for every time I take $20 out, but I'd save much more effectively if I kept putting 20s in even on the days I take nothing out. In short, staying the same does not equal improving. Really improving will require me to curb my original behaviour (spending), on TOP of engaging in neutralizing behaviour. If I can take personal responsibility and stop spending as much, there will be less to neutralize in the first place.
To that end, the aim of this article was to shake up complacency - simply to remind people that it's no longer enough to support that forest in Gabon only because we flew to Japan; we should be supporting that forest in Gabon even if we DON'T fly to Japan. This way, we not only stabilize, but improve upon the level of carbon we're putting into the air.
Hope that makes sense. Thanks for your contribution to this discussion, and I would love to hear any further thoughts you have on this issue!
Thanks for your response. It is always nice when authors take the time to respond to comments.
Regarding your first paragraph: Yes, it is difficult to quantify emissions from different sources and (with reference to the specific example) to account for the non-permanence of forestry activities. However, it is not impossible. Much work has been done to quantify the impact of aviation emissions, as well as forestry emissions, and to express each impact in the form of the universal standard for measuring emissions (i.e. metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent), so that cross-sectoral comparisons are possible. In addition, much work is being done to account for the potential non-permanence of forestry emissions (and other land-use activities), and any offset scheme involving these types of credits should address this through, for example, internalizing the cost of insurance to purchase replacement credits in case of reversals.
Regarding your second paragraph, I fully agree that the ultimate goal is to improve upon the status quo. (My personal dream is that, in ten or twenty years, people will talk at their dinner parties about their solar panels, methods of recycling home wastewater, electric cars, and so on.) But in any future that is worth living in, some emissions will be necessary -- even if just to produce the aluminium and rubber that goes into bicycles, the steel that goes into windmills, or the cement used in constructing schools and hospitals -- and offsets are a way of neutralizing the damage that they cause.
Finally, as an aside, I find hypocritical and absurd the viewpoint of "Responsible Travel" that offsets are akin to medieval indulgences. If emissions are as sinful and unpardonable as they claim, why on earth are they in the business of (and presumably making money from) selling flights?