Offsetting your carbon sins 20 February 07

Carbon offsetting – paying someone to reduce carbon emissions elsewhere so that you can fly or drive a car – has always been controversial. One recent site lampoons it by offering offsets for ‘cheating’: you can cheat on your boyfriend or wife, according to Cheatneutral.com, and someone else will stay monogamous or single, thereby keeping the overall level of cheating the same. It’s quite a clever analogy – as the page on ‘Five ways that cheatneutral is like carbon offsetting’ makes clear.

A more extensive report on carbon offsetting has just been released by the campaigning group Carbon Trade Watch – this one gives a hint of its critical analysis in the title: ‘The carbon neutral myth – offset indulgences for your climate sins’ (pdf link). Again, I think the specific objection is a valid one – that carbon savings expected to be made in the future are counted as savings made in the present. “This is known as ‘future value accounting’, and is the same technique used by Enron to inflate its profits with such disastrous consequences,” the report states.

Another objection to carbon offsetting – as purveyed by companies such as Climate Care and the Carbon Neutral Company – is that they encourage the belief that there is no need for wider lifestyle change to tackle global warming; that carbon consumption can go on just the same as long as you pay a small amount of ‘offset’ money. This is debatable – but I was shocked to see the Climate Care logo on a newspaper advert for Land Rovers recently: this is surely like encouraging people to commit sins so you can sell them indulgences, and even the medieval Catholic church drew the line at that.