Articles

Psst! Wanna buy some "C"?
Knightshift Tomorrow Magazine September-October 2000

For a few dollars organisations are offering to "neutralise" the carbon emitted (indirectly) by your fridge, dishwasher or any of our beloved energy-consuming gadgets. They're even pushing it at rock festivals, promising to plant a tree.

They take your money, calculate how much carbon could be fixed by your tree, and then make a deal with a land owner to plant and maintain a certain number of trees for a very long time (certainly way past your death). Some will also take a cut of the deal as their profit, and why not?

The cost? In the UK, the leading carbon neutraliser offers trees for £4 which works out at a long term gain of 33kg of carbon per US $. The US equivalent offers 87kg of carbon for your buck.

These offers must not be confused with those promising a flight on the first commercial moon landing, a seaside plot on Venus, or a fast-breeding Belgian ostrich called Mabel (more of which later).

No, this is the deadly serious and fast-emerging market that has all the promise of being even sillier than fat adults riding childrens' push scooters. Welcome to the whacky world of carbon offset: where you buy a promise to set you free of carbon-based guilt.

The market is borne out of the need to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the air from burning fossil fuels. The one good thing about carbon is that it can be temporarily locked away (as it was before it became a fossil fuel). One of the sexiest ways to capture and keep it is in trees, which absorb and fix carbon as they grow.

Trees, like whales, are icons of a good, green world. Planting a lot of trees to save the planet really fires our imagination. The right trees in the right place are of course fantastic for the earth, providing habitats for both animals and playful humans, while sucking in our carbon excesses.

But the weakness in the consumer offset promise is about the human condition. In as much as we are capable of destroying the world's forests, it is not beyond reason that we could also promise to plant new forests without any real hope that someone is going to look after the trees for long enough for them to do their job. This is where Mabel can teach us a lesson.

A few years ago, when everyone was excited about the fat-free meat of the ostrich private investors were given the unique opportunity to put their life savings - as many did - into an ostrich-farm. You could buy Mabel and her promised offspring would be your pension. Yum. Yum. Most of the investors were in the UK and the ostrich farm in Belgium. By the time the dividends failed to arrive and the head-in-sand investors made it over the channel to check on their charges, it was revealed that Mabel who appeared in the advertisements had been sold to an awful lot of people.

The scam was perpetrated in a highly regulated market. Carbon offset - in as much as it is a market - is unregulated, untested and based on much longer time scales - around 100 years. Much depends on the development of legal contracts and verification systems that will provide the evidence on which trust between the various players can be maintained - investors, brokers, forest owners etc. These systems are expensive, complex and undeveloped.

It strikes me that it would be prudent for consumers, no matter how much they want to save the world, to tiptoe terribly carefully when offered "C". Leave it up to big business and government to set up the deals because they can afford the verifiers and the lawyers.

We consumers can do much more for the planet by simply consuming less fossil fuel. "C" sellers make double-glazing salesmen seem like saints.