Carbon cop-outs

The carbon offset industry was all
about growth in 2006.The highprofile
Carbon Neutral Company
reported an annual turnover of
£2.7 million, while the global market
sold an estimated £60 million, a figure
that is expected to increase fivefold in
the next three years. From the World
Cup to HSBC and BP's offset petrol,
individuals, organisations and
corporations have been keen to prove
their climate-friendly credentials by
going 'carbon neutral'.The success of
the different schemes reflects the fact
that there is an increase in popular
awareness about the need to engage
with climate change. But are these
schemes offering a valid approach to the
problem, or are they detracting from the
real action that needs to take place?

The first carbon offset project was
organised in the US in 1989, when
Applied Energy Services had its plans to
build a 183 megawatt coal-fired power
station approved partly due to its
pioneering offset, which involved
planting 50 million trees in the
impoverished Western Highlands of
Guatemala.This initial project was beset
by many of the problems that have
plagued offset projects ever since.The
non-native trees that were planted
initially were inappropriate for the local
ecosystem and caused land degradation.
The local people had their habitual
subsistence activities, such as gathering
fuel wood, criminalised.Ten years on
from the start of the project, evaluators
concluded that the offset target was far
from being reached.

Some years later, in 1996, the idea to
set up a company to market such
schemes was cooked up and Future
Forests (which later changed its name to
the Carbon Neutral Company) was
launched. It gained a great deal of
publicity initially through high-profile
celebrity endorsements from the likes of
the Rolling Stones, Leonardo di Caprio
and Brad Pitt. Climate Care established
itself the following year, and by 2006
there were a further 21 companies
marketing voluntary offset projects to
individuals, companies and events.

Some environmentalists were dubious
about both the ethics and the efficacy of
carbon offsets from the beginning, but
the dark clouds of doubt and
controversy have been gathering
throughout 2006. In April, articles
appeared in the national press suggesting
that some 40 per cent of the mango
trees in southern India that Coldplay
had sponsored to offset the emissions
from the recording of their second
album had died.The villagers who were
supposed to be the benefactors of the
scheme made allegations of unfulfilled
promises and project mismanagement,
and there was a breakdown in relations
between the Carbon Neutral Company
and its project partner in India.Yet for
months afterwards, fans of the band
were still being sold dedicated trees in
the plantations that were still being
portrayed as a glowing success story.

In October, the UK Advertising
Standards Authority (ASA) ordered the
Scottish and Southern Energy Group
(SSE) to stop making claims about
'neutralising' its customers' emissions in
its leaflets. In the contentious advert, the
SSE claimed to 'plant trees to balance
out the CO2 that your gas heating and
household waste produces'. Although
the SSE was able to provide figures on
what emissions the average household
produced, the lack of scientific
knowledge about the carbon cycle
meant that it was unable to provide
sufficient evidence that the number of
trees it planted would match or exceed
the level of emissions, and it was thus in
breach of the ASA guidelines. It has yet
to be seen what impact this ruling will
have on the countless other spurious 'neutralising' claims made by similar
offset schemes.

These incidents, and many others,
have highlighted some of the technical
problems with offset schemes, and have
brought the environmental or social
shortcomings of specific projects into
focus. Less has been written about how
offset schemes are fundamentally
ineffective in addressing climate change
through their emphasis on personal
consumption, lifestyle and individual
action.

Social change is a necessary precursor
to dealing with climate change.There is
an urgent need to restructure society
away from the fossil fuels-based, carcentred,
throwaway economy 'business as
usual' scenario to one in which we
pragmatically reduce our emissions
levels in the context of a renewable
energy-based, participatory, diversified
transport, reuse/recycle economy. No
matter how many low-energy light
bulbs you install, or how much recycling
you do, there is still the need for more
systemic changes to take place in
society. No amount of individualistic
action is going to bring about this
change in itself.

Such changes will not happen
without community organising and
collective political action.Yet there are
no offset schemes that encourage
individuals to engage in collective
action to bring about wider structural
change. Offset schemes place the onus
for climate action on individuals acting
in isolation from others.This inhibits
their political effectiveness.

The act of commodification at the
heart of offset schemes assigns a
financial value to the impetus that
someone may feel to take climate
action, and neatly transforms this
potential to bring about change into
another market transaction.There is
then no urgent need for people to
question the underlying assumptions
about the nature of the social and
economic structures that brought about
climate change in the first place. One
just has to click and pay the assigned
price to get 'experts' to take action on
your behalf. Not only is it ineffective
and based on half-baked guessing games
and dubious science, it is also very
disempowering for the participants.

The single most effective - and
incontrovertible - way of dealing with
climate change is drastically to limit the
quantity of fossil fuels being extracted.
Providing support for communities who
are resisting the efforts of the industries
to extract and burn ever-increasing
quantities, therefore, is one of the most
important strategies in dealing with
climate change.Yet it is the least
encouraged because, unlike carbon
offsets, it involves posing a critical
challenge to the established systems of
corporate power and societal
organisation.

One of the most inspiring recent
examples of effective climate action has
been the victory of the Ogoni women
in stopping Shell from flaring gas from
its oil fields in Nigeria. Not only was
this the source of numerous pollution
and health problems for the Ogoni
people; it was also the single largest
source of CO2 emissions in sub-Saharan
Africa.This hard-won victory, a huge
success in terms of both social justice
and climate change, depended on
community empowerment,
confrontational politics and international
solidarity.

One of the most distressing effects of
the culture of offsets is the fact that it
negates all three of these factors. Instead
of community empowerment, climate
change is presented as a matter of
individualistic morality and lifestyle
choices that discourages collective
political action.We are being led to
believe that responsible consumer
choice is all that is necessary on our
part, rather than engaging in a different
kind of political responsibility and
activity - one that confronts the fact
that there are profound changes that
need to be made in our society in order
to effectively deal with climate change.
The notion of international solidarity is
transformed into a one-sided affair
involving a neo-colonial relationship of
economic advantage and conditional
aid.

Promoting a more systemic approach
to climate change would not seek to
reduce the problem to marketing
gimmicks, technological quick fixes or
neo-colonial exploitation.Any
individual, organisation or government
embracing this holistic attitude would
commit to doing everything they could
to reduce their climate impact, but
would not 'offset' responsibility for their
remaining emissions. Rather they would
commit to demanding, adopting and
supporting climate policies that reduce
emissions at source.

This means supporting stricter
regulation, powers of oversight and
penalties for polluters at all levels. It
means supporting communities
adversely impacted by climate change
and so-called 'climate-friendly' projects.
Finally, it means endorsing the notion
that real solutions to climate change
require social change; and, for those
who count themselves as a part of that
movement, spending time and energy
towards achieving such change.

Published in Red Pepper, December 2006