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I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised to discover that carbon offsets are now being traded like any other financial commodity. But it makes me uneasy.
I have been investigating what has happened to the cash I gave to the Climate Care company in August to
offset the carbon emissions from flights I took in the previous year. I have discovered that, as the carbon offsetting business expands, companies are trading in the tonnes of carbon they have prevented from reaching the atmosphere in a manner that seems – I hate to say this, but this is the comparison that comes to mind – a bit like the
sub-prime mortgage bringing down financial markets; a similar failure in carbon offsetting could bring down the climate.
I gave my offsetting cash – £168.75 – to
Climate Care based in Oxford, UK. Recently I visited their offices to find out which projects my money is now being invested in.
Virtually all my money, it turns out, has gone into three projects. Rainforest restoration in Uganda's Kibale National Park has received 20%. A project to supply more efficient cooking stoves in Cambodia has received 44%; and wind turbines in China have received 35%.
The Kibale project is a long-standing scheme that Climate Care has been funding for some years. My money will go to plant trees that will absorb CO
2 from the air. So far as I can see, the scheme has local community support and has been delivering the goods.
The Cambodian cooking stoves scheme is similarly a Climate Care project, in which – provided the stoves remain in use – my money will have cut emissions by the promised amount within seven years. But the Chinese wind turbines are a bit different.
Climate Care is using my money to buy a share of the carbon credits generated by a turbines project started and run by others. The deal is being done through a carbon broker. This makes me a bit more jumpy. I trust Climate Care, but how can I be sure of whether this deal is watertight?
Climate Care's Michael Buick says these brokered projects actually give greater certainty, because the carbon has already been saved. So offsetters like me are not taking a gamble on future emissions reductions.
And these projects also bring more cash into the offsetting business, because they encourage entrepreneurs to set up forestry or renewable energy schemes in the hope of securing an eventual profit from selling the carbon credits.
I can see the logic of this new carbon capitalism. But I am uneasy about money-makers getting between me and the schemes intended to cut CO
2 emissions.
Buick says Climate Care intends to carry on with its own projects, and has set up a company specifically to do this. But suddenly Climate Care sounds more like carbon bank than a carbon offsetting company.
Fred Pearce, senior environment reporterLabels: freds-footprint
Seems like those things would have been a better use of the money, even though it wouldn't have made you feel "carbon neutral", as if that term means anything at all. I think that we'll find that these "carbon neutral" firms are just another way of making money off of good-intentioned people.