And Another Thing…

The current media backlash against carbon offsetting could whip away funds from some groundbreaking projects in Asia and Africa, says Martin Wright. And the government might just be about to make it worse.

Remember when offsets were cool? When everyone from Coldplay to FIFA banged on about their carbon neutrality?

Now you can hardly mention them without incurring a great howl of derision. Almost overnight, offsets have slumped from ‘dream solution’ to ‘mother of all futile gestures’. Columnists compare them derisively to indulgences flogged to medieval sinners to shorten their time in purgatory. (Whoever first came up with that clunking metaphor should be claiming royalties, so often has it been recycled in the last few months.)

Everyone from George Monbiot to Peter Hitchens, activist and amateur alike, weighs in to give offsets a good kicking. Buy one and you’re just buying complacency, a guilt-free pass to carry on as normal.

“Trashing all offsets in the name of ecological correctness just plays to the very worst of British cynicism.”

To an extent, it’s all rather inevitable. Offsets had been over-hyped for years. Some of them – the early forestry ones in particular – were always prone to accusations of flakiness. And, of course, curbing emissions at source is always more effective than trying to soak them up later – or stop them happening elsewhere.

But to stick the knife into offsets with such relish, just when they’re starting to gain common currency, is a touch perverse. Most people out there aren’t champing at the bit to make revolutionary lifestyle changes, much as the activist might wish them to. But they’re more than happy to make some small payment in return for a dose of feelgood. To them, it’s pretty unimportant whether or not this totally and utterly neutralises their carbon. They just want to do something useful.

To trash that in the name of ecological correctness plays to the very worst of British cynicism. Why? Because many will use the backlash as a trigger to do nothing at all. Like those who smugly refuse to give money to Oxfam because they know “the aid doesn’t really get through”, they’ll have the perfect excuse for inertia.

Take your average Land Rover driver, quietly pleased that his miles have been offset thanks to the company’s deal with Climate Care. Then he reads that it’s all a con. So he thinks, “Hang on, this offset stuff isn’t all it seems… I need to do more, much more”, and so the scales fall from his eyes. He gives up his car, gets on his bike, and stops flying to his weekend pad in the Med… Get real, it’s not going to happen.

Contrary to the activists’ rhetoric, people who offset their air miles don’t, as a rule, end up flying further, smug in the knowledge they’ve atoned for their sins. At worst, their impact stays the same. More often, they reduce it. For many who are otherwise untouched by green concerns, offsets can be a relatively painless gateway to more significant actions – rather than a forbidding door marked ‘Abandon cars all ye who enter here’.

That, at least, is what the surveys seem to show. Admittedly, the only ones available are carried out by offset companies themselves - who would say that, wouldn’t they. So there’s an urgent need for some independent research to establish whether – and how much – offsets have a knock-on effect.

Meanwhile, the government has launched a consultation aimed at establishing a ‘gold standard’ for offset rigour. All well and good, except early indications are that ‘rigour’ will be interpreted as something along the lines of the process-heavy Clean Development Mechanism. Which means your ‘gold’ offset would fund one-millionth of the cost of cleaning up one of hundreds of Chinese coal power stations. It might be logical, but it’s hardly seductive. There’s a need for rigour, sure, but it would be a shame if that came at the price of inspiration.

The sort of inspiration which comes from knowing that you’ve helped a woman in Nepal get a biogas cookstove – so freeing her from walking three hours a day to fetch firewood from dwindling forests, and then spending the rest of her waking hours in a kitchen filled with enough wood smoke to give her and her kids chronic lung disease for life. Or the inspiration which comes from hearing how you’ve enabled a Bangla family swap their dirty, dim kerosene lamp for clean solar light.

Such small-scale, voluntary offsets make a direct, tangible difference, both to carbon emissions and to the quality of life of some of the world’s poorest people, none of whom give a damn whether they’ve precisely balanced your emissions or not. And it would be a shame indeed if they were stigmatised as somehow second class – or smeared out of fashion by a media backlash.

In time there might be a global carbon market, where these transactions happen seamlessly, driving down carbon emissions as they drive up the price. But meanwhile, it’s surely better to replace a single kerosene lamp with solar power, than to sit there, principles intact, cursing the darkness.

3 May 2007

Martin Wright