Offsets remain off-putting to many experts intent on curbing CO2 emissions – from Grist.org
The below is an excerpt from “Interview: Neal Dikeman Co-founder of Carbonflow on web technology’s role in addressing climate change.”
COD: In a Sustainable Industries column (06/30/08 “Putting carbon offsets in their place”) you wrote that carbon offsets “drive the carbon out of the economy in the cheapest possible manner.” Yet, carbon offsets continue to receive a good deal of criticism in the media and mainstream seems wary. What’s the bottom line, are carbon offsets a useful tool or not?
Neal: Definitely. To be clear, fighting climate change takes a range of policies. Offsets are one weapon in the arsenal. One of the huge hidden dangers of climate change policy is unequal prices of carbon in the economy, which can cause economic collateral damage. Basically, if my region or industry has a higher price of carbon than other areas, production will flow to that other area, unless I can buy my carbon from that area, which offsets effectively permit, equalizing the price.
In addition, our policies should be catalyzing fast, large, cheap and early action on climate change. Since cap and trade takes years to get up and running, and years more to enact across all sectors and regions (think China), we need a path to get started, and to keep pressure on the regulated industries. Offsets, provide an excellent mechanism to mobilize the private sector capital and people to find the biggest and worst offending GHG externalities, and smash them with hammer first. Cap and trade without offsets does not do that. One can argue that the biggest areas of concern in Clean Development Mechanism offsets were the massive industrial gas projects in Asia, where some carbon project developers made a ton (no pun intended) of money. Critics complain that looks like “climate profiteering”. And there’s some truth to the concerns over good validation. But in fact, that’s cap and trade working to a “T”. The largest, most egregious, cheapest to reduce GHG abatements happened first and fast, because of the carbon offsets, even in the markets like China that may be regulated last. That’s exactly what we want our policy to do.
The other big concern is speed. Without offsets, climate abatement generally would get backended to the end of the early commitment periods. Offsets drive carbon projects early in the process, and keep the pressure up on carbon regulated companies by enabling immediate and lasting competition to find the lowest cost ton.
I’d argue anyone against offsets either doesn’t understand economics or trade, or is really trying to argue for a high price of carbon – which you and I will pay for.
The below are comments excerpted from
To say that “offsetting is not a solution to our climate woes” is simply false. Offsetting is not THE solution, but it’s certainly A solution. It’s obviously better to minimize one’s own resource consumption, but unless we collectively commit suicide, we’re going to continue to generate CO2, and we need to invest in emissions reductions whenever and wherever we can.
Innovative services like ShopGreen operate much like an “opt in” carbon tax by allowing consumers to fund efforts to improve energy efficiency, capture and destroy landfill and dairy methane emissions, reforest degraded lands, and accelerate renewable energy development.
If every online shopper chose to send 1% of every online purchase to high quality offset projects, huge amounts of money would flow to myriad emissions reduction efforts worldwide, so for anyone to argue that offsetting — when done right — doesn’t help address climate change simply reflects their ignorance of how carbon offsetting works.
The problem with many people IMO is that they don’t understand how offsetting works, what is a climate exchange, what offsetting standards are available, and how many plants in India and China have reduced their emissions only because of the carbon markets.
China has a population of over a billion,and India is already a rival to the Chinese population where some predict it may outnumber the Chinese around 2025.
And both the Chinese and Indians having their living styles way below the Americans and Europeans. If these 2 nations decide to adopt the western lifestyle, flying to cities every now and then, every person running a car, and high electricity consumption, we will soon understand what greenhouse gas emissions are.
And it would just take you a 30 minute conversation with a consultant in the carbon markets, to appreciate the whole concept of offsets.
I do agree that there are scams and issues like additionality, but weighing the whole industry on that is just like blaming the whole pond for what only the small fish did.
Posted on July 28, 2009 · in Carbon Market News
