Offsetting your conscience 22 January 07

There’s been a fair amount of media hooplah following the announcement by the UK government that it is considering setting up a gold standard for carbon offsetting, with the aim of driving cowboys out of the business. But what’s the difference between the dodgy firms planting ‘offset’ trees on someone else’s land in Uganda and more reputable outfits like Climate Care and the Carbon Neutral Company?

Well, the two latter companies properly audit their projects, for a start. But I’m still profoundly sceptical about their real-world impact. For one thing, offsets don’t reduce carbon emissions – they simply displace them from one place to another. What we need is reductions, globally and quickly. And what if offsetting is simply a conscience-salve which allows people to fly when they might otherwise have chosen a less damaging way to travel? Climate Care denies it has this effect, of course.

So how do they explain the use of their logo on two half-page adverts in last Sunday’s Observer, both for highly-polluting 4×4s? On page 8, we see a Land-Rover Discovery mounting the steps at a faux-Oscar ceremony, and are told that the car comes in as the ‘best large 4×4’ cateogry in What Car? magazine. But don’t worry, it comes with CO2 emissions offset for the first 45,000 miles. On the facing page, a similar advert extols the virtues of the ‘All new Freelander 2’, which appears parked in front of a volcano. Both adverts feature the Climate Care logo in the top corner.

I’m not the first person to use the analogy of papal indulgences of the Middle Ages, when the Catholic Church offered a way for people to buy their way out of hell after committing sins. But this is even worse – here we have Climate Care complicit in encouraging people to commit sins in the first place, so that they can make money by then supposedly selling us a way out of the resulting hell of climate chaos. They incite people to damage the climate, so they can then sell us a way to save it. Well, I don’t buy it. I think it’s shameful, and it’s a scam.