|
| ||||||||
|
|
How to Green Your Carbon Offsets What’s the Big Deal? One of these is carbon offsets. Carbon dioxide, a significant greenhouse gas, is emitted into the atmosphere as a result our intensive use of fossil fuels like oil and coal. In simplistic terms this is ‘bad’. One means of doing ‘good’ is by paying to balance (or offset) the equation, by funding projects that reduce our emissions of carbon (and other greenhouse gases). If only it were as simple as it sounds. 1. Offsets Won’t Save Us The only reason to buy carbon offsets is to compensate for the greenhouse gases you contribute to Earth’s atmosphere, that you can’t change in any other way. While a bandaid can help a wound to heal, we all know that prevention is better than a cure. Implementation of real changes in your life will have more impact than any carbon offset you purchase. You see all these statistics about it being the equivalent of taking x number of cars off the road. Catching the train, tram, bus or riding your bike also takes a car off the road! Voting with your physical presence carries more weight than a mostly invisible deduction on your bank statement. Your neighbours see you walking to the bus stop, your butt takes up another train seat contributing demand for public transit, your work colleagues talk about you arriving on your bike. Your actions have a ripple effect. So the first step is to reduce the energy load you directly create. If after you’ve done the best you can on that score, only then might there be merit in offsetting those activities that you have less control over. But do so aware that offsets are no silver bullet. 2. The Forgotten Offset: Green Power The TV, the home computer, the kettle, the stereo, often the hot water, the air conditioning and a plethora of other thingamees in your house all use electricity from the grid. Many of us would love to have a solar panels on the roof or a wind turbine in the back yard so that our energy came from a renewable, non-greenhouse polluting source like coal. But most of us don’t, often because even if it saves money over time, the upfront cost seems too scary. But you can run your house (or your business) on solar, wind, or hydro and biomass energy without having a dam or pig farm in your yard. Contact your local power utility as ask about their Green Power or Green Energy options. For a few dollars more on your normal bill you will be helping them fund the establishment of such clean energy facilities. Utilities are required by law to provide a supply of renewable energy to the grid, equal to the kilowatt hours of those customers signed up for GreenPower. The more who sign up, the more solar and wind farms that have to be built. 3. Be Nosey For those times where you can’t make the appropriate behavioural changes, and feel that carbon offsetting is your best options, spend a little time getting to know your offset provider. Undertake a little research, just as you would when buying a new washing machine or bed. What will your offsets go to? Are their projects certified? Does any independent authority audit them to ensure your money is going to the projects mentioned in the marketing? Do they have a solid client list? Contact some of those clients and see what they thought of the service? What is the price per tonne? How does this compare? Do they use any recognised guidelines to prepare their calculations? Are your funds supporting new projects, not ‘business as usual’? As The Guardian newspaper put it, "There is nothing but the customer's canniness to stop a company claiming to be running a scheme which does not exist; claiming wildly exaggerated carbon cuts; selling offsets that have already been sold; charging hugely inflated prices." 4. See the Trees for the Forests One of the most well known forms of carbon offsetting is to plant trees. The idea being that as trees grow they absorb carbon dioxide, one of the most prevalent greenhouse gases. The carbon is then locked, captured or sequestered in that tree until it is burnt, or falls over and become forest humus, at which time the carbon is released again into the atmosphere. While all this is true, we don’t yet know just how effective trees are at trapping carbon. Scientists now suspect that it works best in tropical forests and might even have a detrimental effect in locations closer to the poles. Also it takes many years for a tree to grow, anywhere from 15 to 150 years, so the capture of carbon is taking place over a long period. And our problem with Climate Change is right here and now. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be planting more trees, we should for their proven abilities in improving soil retention, salinity reduction, microclimate stability, biodiversity habitat and so on, but we shouldn't be relying on them to save our climate dilemma. 5. Blowin’ in the Wind Rather than plant trees some offset providers support the growth in renewable energy generation, via the usual suspects of wind farms and solar photovoltaic plants. But other options may include hydro, waste-to-energy, geothermal, methane extraction from landfill or agricultural residues. In many cases your financial contribution is directly buying more wind turbines or silicon for solar panels. But it might also be making such facilities viable. Often new renewable energy plants have to compete with entrenched and subsidised fossil fuel energy systems, like coal or natural gas. Your offset money oftentimes goes to helping the renewable energy provider sell their initially higher cost electricity at near to equal parity to those well established energy industries. You are helping benign energy set up a beachhead on hostile shores. Seek out verified clean energy projects ahead of reforestation ones. 6. Go for Gold Only countries and large corporations trade offsets under the Kyoto Protocol, the offsets you and I, and small businesses have access to are known as Voluntary Offsets. They are not binding. We don’t have to do do them. But we do want the people we buy from to adhere to some standard. The de facto benchmark is aGold Standard project. These are assessed by a consortium of 38 international green groups, including the likes of WWF, the David Suzuki Foundation and Greenpeace, and follow the same basic premise as the Kyoto Protocol. But double check which projects are currently meeting the standard, and which are in the process of being assessed. 7. Certifiable Gold Standard aren’t the only ones in the game, however. Some governments have their own accreditation programs. For example in Australia there are authorised offset companies registered with the New South Wales state government, under a greenhouse gas abatement scheme. The Federal government in that country also has its own Greenhouse Friendly labelling program for national offset projects. Look for similar verification in your country. Much of the criticism of carbon offsets is not so much about the intent, but rather the process, and how it has lacked transparency and verification. It has been likened to a new Wild West, so it makes sense to settle in the town where Wyatt Earp is sherrif. Only sign up to those programs that offer the highest level of accountability. 8. Making Demands While treeplanting is of long term biological merit, and renewal energy generation of great significance, neither of these will really make a difference, if the average citizen doesn’t becomes engaged too. We need to use less energy, period. This is where the third ( and arguably the strongest) leg of the carbon neutral stool enters the stage. Energy efficiency is about making our homes and businesses less demanding on our electricity utilities. It delivers immediate and measurable reductions in CO2 emissions. So one of the more effective carbon offsets is the funding of energy audits and installation of the likes of low energy compact fluorescent bulbs and low flow shower heads. This about reducing their inadvertent demand for energy for while still providing their quality of life. It is also known as Demand Side Abatement — reduce the overall demand for electricity and you also decrease reliance on greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuel energy. 9. You Want Fries With That? One of the crucial keys to carbon offsets is known as ‘Additionality.’ Were these projects going to happen anyway, whether you paid your carbon neutral fee or not? You wouldn’t want to pay extra for your fries, if they were already included in a meal deal, would you? Offsetting carbon means displacing individual emissions, be they personal, business or event related, and this can only be accomplished if a new carbon displacement project is occurring as a result of your financial contribution. Ask hard questions. It’s your money. You’re buying something way more important than burger. 10. DIY Offsets There is no free lunch connected to our carbon emissions. If we continue as we are, our energy thirsty ways will change the weather and the ecosystems that support our current lifestyle. We can pay someone else to make changes on our behalf, via offsets. Or we can take responsibility to make those changes ourselves, and this has its own costs in time, energy, mindset and/or money. But at least they will be personal and tangible changes. Compost our household waste so less goes to landfill, where it forms methane, a gas more harmful to global warming than even carbon dioxide. Drive less. Vacation nearer home. Join a treeplanting day with a community group. Install a solar hot water system on our home. Commit to eating at least one meat-free meal a week. Install draft excluder strips on external doors, replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents or LEDs. Send the market a signal by ensuring your shares and stocks are invested in renewable energy power utilities, instead of fossil fuel ones. It is these sorts of behavioral changes, which will, collectively, have the most lasting impact. 11. Smile Global warming is a crisis. It may indeed turn out to have, as has been suggested, higher economic costs than both World Wars and the Great Depression combined. But it serves none of us well to go get all down in the mouth about it. Hope can drive courage and determination, which ultimately gets results. Slavery, women’s rights, communism, apartheid, colonial rule, polio, flight, space travel, Everest, etc. All points in human history where we have shown to ourselves than we can overcome the seemingly unassailable. The future is ours to jointly create. A poor craftsman may blame his tools, but a wise one choses them wisely. He doesn’t pound a nail with a screwdriver. Offsets are a useful tool, but only when correctly deployed. Use them with care, to craft a tomorrow that gives your children cause for hope. |
|||||||
|
||||||||
Send mail to KeysDAN@keysdan.com with
questions or comments about this web site. |
||||||||
