Carbon Trading - Offsetting Or Cheating?

Introduction

Have you ever stopped to consider how ethical it is to pay someone else to compensate for the emissions you are responsible for? In effect, offsets offer a way of buying yourself a clean conscience by paying others to undo the harm you are causing. Thus, I had a chuckle recently when I came across an innovative English pair who have taken this market proven concept and applied it to the tricky and often rocky realm of human relationships. On their website called CheatNeutral, these two students offer to offset your sexual infidelity by paying someone else to maintain a faithful relationship and not cheat. Under the heading, “Can I offset all my cheating?” CheatNeutral offers the following advice, “First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating.”

Analysis

'Carbon offset is the act of paying someone else for reducing ("offsetting") their greenhouse gas emissions, when one is unable or unwilling to reduce one's own emissions. A well-known example is the planting of trees to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions from personal air travel (Tietenberg,

37-34).

Figure 1

The idea of paying for emission-reductions elsewhere instead of reducing by own actions is also known from the closely related concept of emissions trading, but while emissions trading is mostly in a strict formal and legal framework, carbon offsets generally refer to voluntary acts, often arranged by a commercial carbon offset provider (Parry and Williams, pp 347-349). A wide variety of offset methods are in use — while tree planting has initially been a mainstay of carbon offsetting, renewable energy and energy conservation offsets have now become increasingly popular, and purchase and withdrawal of emissions trading credits is also seen. These projects are generally termed "emissions reductions projects" or "carbon projects (Bohm and Larsen, 219-211)."

Carbon offsetting as part of a "carbon neutral" lifestyle has gained some appeal and momentum mainly among consumers in western countries who have become aware and concerned about the potentially negative effects of energy-demanding lifestyles and economies on the environment. This has contributed to the increasing popularity of voluntary offsets among private individuals and also companies. Offsets may be cheaper or more convenient alternatives to reducing one's own fossil-fuel consumption. However, some critics object to carbon offsets, and many have questioned the benefits of certain types of offsets (such as tree planting), and other projects (Dudek and LeBlanc, pp 29-30).

This clever critique of carbon offsetting strikes to the heart of a very real debate. After all, as demonstrated by a few cavalier corporations, carbon offsetting in some cases only buys a clean conscience, without really changing behaviour to reduce emissions. Funnily enough, this is not the first time that such sordid schemes have been sold to unsuspecting consumers. In his book The Rise of the Dutch Republic published in 1855, John Lothrop Motley describes the means by which the people of the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries could ...