The Carbon Trading Hoax

Carbon trading is a growing industry. If you have no personal experience of it, visit www.carbonfund.org or one of the many similar sites. At these sites you can send them money to eliminate your personal carbon footprint or your family's or the family cars and so on. Sort of makes you a good citizen of the planet and it's relatively cheap. Would that it were all so simple. However the leading writer on the subject, George Monbiot, explains in The Guardian why carbon trading isn't the answer:

"The problem is this. If runaway climate change is not to trigger the irreversible melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets and drive hundreds of millions of people from their homes, the global temperature rise must be confined to 2C above pre-industrial levels.

"As the figures I have published in my book Heat show, this requires a 60% cut in global climate emissions by 2030, which means a 90% cut in the rich world. Even if, through carbon offset schemes carried out in developing countries, every poor nation on the planet became carbon-free, we would still have to cut most of the carbon we produce at home. Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it.

"Any scheme that persuades us we can carry on polluting delays the point at which we grasp the nettle of climate change and accept that our lives have to change. But we cannot afford to delay.

"The big cuts have to be made now, and the longer we leave it, the harder it will be to prevent runaway climate change from taking place. By selling us a clean conscience, the offset companies are undermining the necessary political battle to tackle climate change at home. They are telling us we don't need to be citizens; we need only to be better consumers.

"BP and Travelcare, like other companies, want to keep expanding their business. Offset schemes allow them to do so while asserting they have gone green. Yet aviation emissions, to give one example, are rising so fast in the UK that before 2020 they will account for the country's entire sustainable carbon allocation. A couple of decades after that, global aircraft emissions will match the sustainable carbon level for all economic sectors, across the entire planet. Perhaps the carbon offset companies will then start schemes on Mars, as we will soon need several planets to absorb the carbon dioxide we release. Offsets, then, are being used as an excuse for the unsustainable growth of carbon-intensive activities.

"But these are not the only problems. A tonne of carbon saved today is far more valuable in terms of preventing climate change than a tonne of carbon saved in three years' time. Almost all the carbon offset schemes take time to recoup the emissions we release today. As far as I can discover, none of the companies that sell them uses discount rates for its carbon savings (which would reflect the difference in value between the present and the future). This means they could all be accused of unintentional but systemic false accounting.

"And while the carbon we release by flying or driving is certain and verifiable, the carbon absorbed by offset projects is less attestable. Many will succeed, and continue to function over the necessary period. Others will fail, especially the disastrous forays into tree planting that some companies have made. To claim a carbon saving, you also need to demonstrate that these projects would not have happened without you - that Mexico would not have decided to capture the methane from its pig farms, or that people in India would not have bought new stoves of their own accord. In other words, you must look into a counterfactual future. I have yet to meet someone from a carbon offset company who possesses supernatural powers.

"At the offices of Travelcare and the forecourts owned by BP, you can now buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction. But you cannot buy the survival of the planet."

There, in a nutshell, is the problem with carbon trading. We need to look for other answers, even if we don't like what we hear.