How credible is carbon compensation?
Eindhoven Airport in the Netherlands
has claimed to be the first airport in Europe where passengers
as of May 2007 can compensate emissions from their flight by donating
for tree plantation projects. Last week however, activist groups
in London have criticized this kind of carbon offsetting. So how
credible is carbon compensation?
Eindhoven Airport cooperates with the
firm GreenSeat that calculates and cashes the compensation fees
and with the FACE Foundation which runs tree planting projects.
They are not the only ones that compensate emissions. The Carbon
Neutral Company - target of the British climate activist group
last week - Climate Care and Offset My Life share the same growing
market. In 2006, the carbon offset market tripled in comparison
with the previous year and it is expected to be worth 450 million
Euros in three years time.
However, according to the organization
Carbon Trade Watch (CTW), part of the Amsterdam based Transnational
Institute, carbon offsetting is nothing more than a modern form
of indulgences - the sin taxing system invented by the Catholic
Church in the late Middle Ages. "The modern-day Pardoners
are building up what they claim are good climate deeds through
projects which supposedly reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions,"
the CTW-organization writes in the recent report The Carbon Neutral
Myth.
Author Kevin Smith argues that
it is impossible to assess just how much CO2 is taken up by trees.
For a start, there is a distinction between the locked-up fossil
carbon and the carbon which is part of the living carbon-cycle.
You can easily convert locked-up carbon to active carbon -we do
it all the time by burning fossil fuels - but you can't put it
back. Once active, carbon might be fixed in a tree trunk for a
while, but eventually the wood will be burnt or rot away releasing
the carbon back into the atmosphere. For this reason claims of
carbon-offsetting by planting trees, by the Scottish and Southern
Energy Group (SSE) were rejected by the UK Advertising Standards
Authority, which ordered the SSE to stop making these claims in
its leaflets.
Due to mounting criticism on tree planting
programs, carbon offsetting firms have started taking refuge in
other compensation projects such as investing in renewable energy
projects or energy efficiency projects which reduce emissions
elsewhere, known as Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint
Implementation (JI). Think of solar panels, wind parks and conversion
of dung and waste into energy. Smith is also sceptical about such
projects, saying that you can never assess the amount of carbon
reduced, since a comparison between the situation with and without
the project cannot accurately be made.
So should we stop flying altogether?
Activist Kevin Smith distinguishes between carbon needs (necessary
and inevitable transports) and carbon luxury (short haul trips
for which alternatives exist, holiday flights). Since compensating
carbon emissions is a myth, according to Smith, it's not right
to make people believe they can continue behaving as they do.
"This greenwashing is just a smokescreen standing in the
way of working towards solutions," says Smith.
Speaking for CarbonNeutral, Sue Welland
told the BBC: "What we do is help companies measure and reduce
their reductions; and where they can't reduce their emissions,
we help them offset."
The main question -a question of conscience
perhaps- is whether certain emissions are necessary or luxury.
UK Environment Minister David Miliband said last month: "The
first step should always be to see how we can avoid and reduce
emissions." But reducing the number of flights is hardly
in the interest of airports. Eindhoven Airport director Bart de
Boer acknowledged that his initiative would not discourage people
to fly. "But that's also not my task here," he remarked.
By
Green Prices, 27 February 2007, sent by Kevin Smith, e-mail:
kevin@carbontradewatch.org, author of "The
Carbon Neutral Myth Offset Indulgences for your Climate Sins”,
Transnational Institute,
http://www.tni.org/detail_pub.phtml?know_id=56&menu=
