Is carbon offsetting the solution? (Or part of the problem?)

We burn fossil fuel in the developed world – and plant much-needed trees in Africa to ‘off set’ our emissions. It sounds like a win-win situation. But is it?

…To its critics, offsetting is no more than a clever accounting trick, a seductive and possibly counter-productive ruse to convince consumers they can get something for nothing. Far from deciding to insulate their lofts, invest in low-energy light bulbs and switch to bio-fuels, most consumers will simply continue their same old polluting ways, thinking they’ve done
their bit for the environment. In other words, as Kevin Smith argues in his book The Carbon Myth, offsetting is capitalism’s version of medieval ‘indulgences’ – a convenient way of assuaging the north’s guilt while Rome, or in this case Africa, continues to burn.

Then there is the issue of how you calculate the carbon sequestered in a particular area of forest and put a value on the resulting ‘credit’. Before I began researching this article I had no idea, as I am sure most British consumers don’t, that when you click on a carbon calculator looking to offset the emissions of your recent shopping trip to New York, what you’re actually buying is a guarantee that those trees will not only be planted but will survive for 100 years – the period required to absorb your emissions and thus render your flight ‘carbon neutral’.

Not only that, but the voluntary market in carbon offsets is self-regulating, meaning it’s potentially open to abuse. Little wonder then that radical ecologists dismiss carbon offsetting as ‘Enron environmentalism’ and label many of the companies who market offset and renewable-energy products as ‘carbon spivs’.

Observer (U.K.)