Indulgences of Modern Times

I was asked if with all the miles we'll cover in the next eight months we have considered buying credits for the emissions of CO2 that we'll cause. On the British Airways website there is a link for a company called Climate Care, which is one of the biggest ones providing this service in the UK. The idea is: by using "government published figures to convert units of energy to CO2 emissions", they tell you how much you pollute when traveling, but even staying at home (using electricity, gas and oil), and they allow you to pay a fee to offset your emissions. The money goes to finance projects to reduce the CO2 emissions in different parts of the world. The goal is to reach a carbon neutral situation where your emissions are neutralized by the green projects you support.

The idea is good, but putting it into practice is another matter and what I saw didn't convince me. The companies offering the service are all private ones and they operate according to schemes that cannot be verified or monitored and some of them turned out to be fraudulent, ineffective or even self defeating, (see The Guardian "The inconvenient truth about carbon offset industry"). Among all the different CO2 emissions, already difficult to calculate by the IPCC own admission, the ones caused by air travel are the most difficult to calculate because depending on altitude and amount of cargo (see FAQ on Climate Care). Even more difficult to establish is the amount of CO2 offset somewhere else. The most popular projects are the ones that plant trees, that naturally get rid of CO2, but the amount is unmeasurable especially because the companies doing it, offset immediately all the CO2 that the tree will process in a 100 years lifespan. A scheme to plant trees in Ecuador(see World Rainforest Movement) has been accused of evicting thousands of small farmers and manage plantations where the CO2 released by the soil is superior to the one absorbed by the trees. The founder of Climate Care, Mike Mason, said that planting trees as a form of offsetting is a waste of time and energy, but unfortunately people love it.

Other projects like the ones that aim to discourage the use of highly polluting fuels for domestic use in India or Africa, are even more difficult to realize because they require the cooperation of the locals. From what I have seen so far, I do not believe that we can trust private companies with offsetting our CO2 and I agree with those who compare it with the medieval practice of buying indulgences in order to keep on sinning with a clear conscience, (see Denis Hays in The New York Times). You can call me Eco-vandal, but until the subject won't be regulated by law and managed by a government, until the cost of CO2 won't be shared proportionally between who causes it and who makes money on it (in 2005 when the scheme was launched BA bought credits for the year that didn't even cover their London-NY routes in a day), I won't feel like punishing myself for the next 8 months.