Selling Indulgences: Carbon Offsets and the New Puritanism

With carbon-offsets turning up everywhere in the chic set, it’s not surprising that mainstream organs from Business Week to the LA Times are doing articles questioning – OF COURSE – the real versus the mythical value of such offsets.  After all, our corporate masters don’t want their convenient "externalities" turned into real costs to eat away at their almighty Profits, and even voluntarily offsetting the cost of their carbon emissions begins to look suspiciously like a Tax if it becomes a necessity of maintaining public respectability.  But lo!  It’s not enough for the Ownership Class to balk at paying their fair share towards cleaning up the mess they are making of this planet.   Hither, thither, and yon as I researched my own carbon consumption, I found that the REAL opponents of carbon offsets not necessarily the Evil Corporate Empires ... they are in fact our own most strident compatriots, those for whom no solution short of Total Commitment can ever be enough ...

You can see it on any list of comments after articles on ecologically-oriented blogs.  A few people praise the opportunity to feel like they can make up for the harm they do the world.  A few organizations pimp their own programs.  And then the Puritans begin.  Purchasing carbon offsets, they intone, is nothing more than Buying Indulgences.  And of course, bought pardons won’t get you into heaven.  Have you switched every lightbulb in your house to a CFC yet?  Have you turned your car into a mini-greenhouse, foresworn long-distance travel, rented an apartment in a nasty old warehouse so you can bike to work, and committed to eat only organically-farmed veggies sold at Farmers’ Markets?  Then you aren’t doing enough, you can still reduce your carbon footprint, and paying for carbon offsets merely encourages you to continue your wasteful and decadent lifestyle.  Of course, ultimately, the only way for any of us to completely cancel out our part of the burden excess human population puts on the Earth is to die ... and then our rotting carcass will still return its carbon to the atmosphere, slowly in the form of methane if we are buried, or directly as CO2 if we go for the upright, no-frills cremation (which also consumes additional fuel that must be considered in the total bill).

Let me be the first to admit to extremity.  I am a fanatic regarding the excess of human population.  Given the opportunity to release a virus that would randomly kill 50-90% of the human beings on this planet, I probably would.  I severely doubt that any combination of economic incentives and birth control will ever reduce the glut of human bodies to a number reasonably consistent with the preservation of OTHER life on Earth, and therefore, look forward to the wars, plagues, and famines with with Gaia will take matters in hand for herself.  Neither do I personally have much faith or interest in consumer culture.  I am in the process of retreating to 28 acres of West Virginia mountaintop to grow ginseng, raise sheep, spin and knit my own wool, and trade honey with my neighbors for meat.  

Personally, I love the primitive lifestyle.  I’ve spent forty years learning how to make it work.  But like everything, it takes resources not everyone has to begin with, and it just doesn’t suit everybody.  There are a lot of people out there who just CAN’T retreat to a mountaintop cabin and raise the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate to the world.  They’re too young to know how to cook over an open fire, or entertain themselves without a silver screen to stare at.  They’re too poor to buy the land outright, and in order to get a mortgage, they have to have a Job.  If they have a Job, they probably have to drive.  And they have to live somewhere other than in the middle of the woods where they can collect their own firewood from deadfall and build a high-efficiency masonry furnace from bricks they make themselves out of the claybank by the stream.  So they have to heat the house in order to survive, and shower every day and keep an air conditioner running so they don’t sweat and therefore offend the sensibilities of their coworkers and Boss, thereby losing the Job.  And they won’t have time to raise most of their vegetables, and their neighbors will be frightened if they keep bees and might sue if they get stung, and none of their neighbors will be knocking down a couple of rabbits and a deer or two to trade for.

Do you tell people, then, that it has to be All or Nothing?  How convenient for the Masters of the World-As-It-Is; since really the only way to achieve All is to die for the ecosphere, and how many people are going to line up for that?  Saying you can’t fix the world incrementally is as good as saying you can’t do it at all, so why bother?  Let’s just go on consuming and polluting our merry way to mutual assured destruction in, say, a century or so (conveniently after our generation is dead).  

Nit-picking and finding fault with organizations selling offsets is just another facet of the ecocidal defeatest mentality.  Again, unless it’s PERFECT, it’s useless, so why bother?  If it can be shown to be flawed, well, then, that’s another argument to put off doing anything at all, especially if it would cost a corporation money (you, they really don’t care about, except they want to keep you from getting the idea that THEY should do something about cleaning up their messes.).  So, Company A paid a small fraction of the cost of a methane digestor and claimed credit for the whole thing being built.  Company B the same for a set of wind generators.  In each case, government funding was available for the majority of the project on the condition that a certain small amount be raised elsewhere, probably conceived as a way to slough off government responsibility for maintaining the project once it was underway.  If SOMEBODY didn’t come up with it, the project wouldn’t go through.  And offsets made it happen.  Did they claim too much credit?  Probably.  Did they charge too much to their customers, considering what they actually bought?  Probably.  Did something happen THAT WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED?  Probably.  Aye, there’s the rub.

There are more than thirty organizations now offering carbon offsets.  Each calculator for carbon footprint is slightly different:  some estimate your energy usage based solely on the size of your house, some want you to feed in precise figures from your electric and heating bills; some categorize your car by Small, Medium, or SUV, while others will take the exact year and model; some charge you extra if you eat meat or even dairy products; some calculate additional charges for the methane from your household garbage.  Then consider the price of the offsets.  Rainforest2Reef.org will offset each ton of carbon by planting a tree in the Mexican rainforest for $1; they figure that the tree will absorb its ton of carbon over a 40-year lifespan.  Carbonneutral.com figures that it takes SIX trees to absorb that same ton of carbon, and they charge $3 per tree for a total of $16.50 (they’re doing it in Australia).  Terrapass sells you a clean conscience to emit 6 tons of carbon by driving for $29.00, coming out to $4.80 per ton, which they invest in wind generators and methane digesters in the developed world.  Whose is "right"?  How much does it really cost to offset your yearly carbon emissions?  Probably everyone involved is taking a wild guess.

But does it matter?  If you want to do something, DO SOMETHING.   So I want to offset 10 tons of carbon somewhere.  Now, who do I want to administer this project?  Or do I really need somebody to administer it for me and give me a little green sticker of approval to prove I did?  Half the groups selling carbon offsets are profit-making corporations, after all.  They take money from you and me, they give some of it to nice ecologically pure projects, and they stuff the rest in the pockets of their executives.  What a racket.  And no wonder RainForest2Reef can undercut their price.  They’re just paying dirt-poor starving Mexicans not to chop down a tree.

I look at it this way:  if you just want to offset your carbon emissions, the best and cheapest way is to sponsor trees in the rainforest belt.  It’s probably the longterm destruction of the planet’s forests that is primarily responsible for runaway Global Warming; humanity has been at it since about 4000 BCE, and we’ve finally reached the point where there’s hardly any more forest to chop down.  Every tree sequesters about 50 lbs of carbon per year of life.  If the tree lives for 50 years, which is fairly normal if humans don’t destroy it, it will remove a ton and more of carbon from the air until such time as it either decays or burns.  So in an ideal world, your $1 offset does the trick.  $1 per ton, easy to do and easy to remember.  BUT ... we don’t live in an ideal world.  Trees in developing countries may very well be cut down for firewood or cleared to plant sugarcane the minute your conservation organization’s back is turned.  So your $1 tree might only absorb 500 lbs of carbon before being turned into kindling.  While your six $3 trees in Australia will be protected by various laws and red tape, meaning they will probably survive for 20 years at least, absorbing 3 tons of carbon ... if, of course, they don’t all wither and die from the wicked drought that Global Warming has already visited on Australia.  Which might be why they want to plant six trees instead of one.  Or you could contribute to Trees for Life, replanting the Caledonian Forest in Scotland, where there should be plenty of water as well as legal protection.  And which is quite pricey, at 60 pounds sterling ($120) for a dozen trees, or $10 per tree.  But Trees for Life is committed to redeveloping a complete former forest ecosystem for at least the next 250 years and if it lasts that long, it might survive a millenium or two on its own.

Want to support alternative energy?  Money invested in IPO stock offerings goes to the company itself, minus a percentage for the dealmakers.  Or send a contribution to any of a number of nonprofit alternative energy research organizations, which can use the funds directly without paying top salaries to Vice Presidents for Internet Marketing, or printing up those silly little green decals for you to paste on your car.  You don’t really need a green decal, do you?  If you do, you can download one from here for free.  It’s worth exactly what you pay for it, which is as good as you get in this imperfect mortal world.

Finally, if you really want to get at the root of the problem, you know what it is.  The same dollar that plants a tree and absorbs a ton of carbon over the course of 50 years, contributed to a family planning agency, can buy a poor woman in the developing world a year’s freedom from pregnancy.  That’s one less child to cut down trees, burn firewood, consume food, and demand a lifestyle equal to yours, which puts 10-20 tons of carbon into the air every year.  During that unpregnant year, the beneficiary of your charity can grow more food, take better care of herself and the children she already has, and maybe even plant trees.  And if you help two women, or ten, stay unpregnant for a year, they might even start a microbusiness.  Apply for a grant.  Get a solar oven that doesn’t need to emit carbon dioxide to bake bread.  Bake little cakes in the solar oven to sell to invading American "peacekeepers" for ridiculous prices, recycling Evile military dollars into Good working capital and maybe educating their daughters so that they have something to do with their lives other than have more children ...

Seriously.  Formally purchasing carbon offsets is a good way to inject money into needed corners of the conservation and alternative energy markets and an excellent prelude to a real carbon tax for businesses and organizations that need third-party certification that they are paying their fair share of the costs they impose on the world.  For individuals, there are a lot of ways to switch from being part of the problem, to becoming part of the solution.  You don’t necessarily need an organization to certify that you did something.  You can decide how you want to offset your own footprints.  Just Do It.