Anthonares

It has been quite some time since I last wrote here. I assure you I have no intention of abandoning this blog, it’s just that my wife is seven and a half months pregnant, and much of the duties of housework and cooking have fallen on me. I just wanted to make a quick entry on something that there has been a lot of misinformation out and about as of late: carbon offsets.

You can find out as much as you’d want to about carbon offsets at Wikipedia or some other handy reference, but here’s my basic distillation. Carbon offsets are simply a contract that you purchase guaranteeing that some amount of carbon you emit is not emitted elsewhere. Thus, the net effect of purchasing offsets is the same carbon-wise, as if you had installed solar panels on your roof, bike to work, and completely avoided flying. But instead, you can purchase carbon offsets and continue to live your regular life with a much-reduced carbon footprint. Win-win!

But this concept has been attacked from both sides. Looking at it from the uber-conservative angle, you are basically spending a few hundred dollars to get a few stickers and a magnet that does absolutely nothing tangible for you. From the uber-liberal perspective, you are paying someone a few hundred dollars to assuage your guilt in some modern form of Reformation-Era Indulgences.

The first viewpoint, the waste of a few hundred dollars on an intangible contract, can be addressed thoroughly by assuring that your carbon offsets are valid. Lots of people have lots of different ideas about this, but here’s mine: don’t pay someone to plant a tree for you in a forest. That tree will take something like 75 years to mature to the point where it offset your emissions from this year. So, if that tree gets attacked by some bark beetle fifty years from now, too bad, your offsets didn’t fully work. And, when that tree decays, your offsets decay as well. So, tree-planting offsets are merely emissions-shifting to some point in the future unless that entire forest is sealed in amber so that it can’t release your carbon back into the atmosphere.

Beyond that, innovation is the key. Programs that fund alternative-energy sources, industrial efficiency improvements, and other emissions-reducing projects are all game as long as they go above and beyond what would have been done in a “business as usual” scenario. In other words, if purely market-based economics would not have dictated replacing the lights in a factory with more efficient lighting, then paying to replace those would be creating a carbon offset. The same is true of all sorts of other economically non-viable projects that are funded by offsets. My particular favorite are using offsets to fund alternative-energy sources that will continue to function beyond this year. This is sort of the opposite of the tree-planting scenario: a few dollars on offsets today go to fund continues carbon reductions into the future.

Okay, so I’ve addressed the validity of the offset very briefly, but I think convincingly. Perhaps more difficult to address is the perspective of the old-style environmentalists: that consumption is morally wrong and that carbon offsets merely allow a wasteful lifestyle to continue unabated. Thus the analogy to religious indulgences. Before dismissing this idea out of hand, let me say this: Americans live in a way that is unnecessarily consumptive and wasteful. All that packaging, disposable diapers (a decision in my near future), throw-away IKEA furniture (which my house is filled with), and all manner of other wasteful behaviors are not necessary to our prosperity. We would be just as healthy and happy with a far smaller environmental footprint as a nation.

Beyond that, the conservation approach to environmentalism works. California has had enormous successes over the last decades in reducing the “energy intensity” of their economy. Their per-capita energy use is far lower than would be expected given their climate and income. A serious and continuous commitment to state-led conservation is largely to credit here. I haven’t heard any Californians complaining about deprivation lately, have you?

There is, however, a point below which one cannot reduce their consumption and continue to live the same lifestyle. For instance, my trip to the Canadian Arctic in 2005 required as much carbon emissions as an entire year of driving. That’s some serious consumption! Should I have declined to go, and passed up an amazing opportunity, in order to conform to some ascetic vision of environmentalism? Hell no! I am not willing to regress to some pre-industrial society in order to save the planet. Thankfully, I don’t have to. I purchased about $50 dollars in carbon offsets for that trip, and with just a few hours labor at work I’d reduced my carbon footprint to zero for that trip.

My father is, right now, engaged in establishing a new factory in China for his company. He has had to fly to Beijing and back 13 times in the last year. This is an enormous amount of emissions that he could negate with carbon offsets. Al Gore’s globetrotting to promote his movie and speak to audiences worldwide released the carbon of a small fleet of vehicles, but does that mean he should not have gone? It’s hard to argue that his trip did more harm than good for the environment. Especially when he bought offsets to cancel out that carbon dioxide pollution.

So, here’s my message to those consumption-is-immoral old school greens: get real. Our modern world has undeniably important aspects that require carbon emissions, and offsets are a way to reduce our impact right now. In the future, perhaps those alternative energy sources will have developed to the point where our energy use is truly without impact. But for now, carbon offsets help to slow global warming today. If you don’t want to do that, and would rather yell at everyone else about how much they waste, go start a new counterculture. The rest of us will continue our progress and look for more real solutions.

BTW, I buy my offsets from Terrapass. I consider them the best value. Green tags are sort of the gold standard in my book, but they’re about twice as expensive right now.