Greenhouse Gas Offsetting
Over here we've been discussing the policy of offsetting your carbon (dioxide) emissions though buying credits from someone like this lot. At the moment, for instance, to offset a flight to Berlin (return) the cost would be £ 1.69, based on emissions 0.23 Tonnes of CO2.This seems rather cheap to me. Apparently the UK could offset its emmissions for about £3bn a year, whilst the world could do it for about $300bn a year. This is a large sum of money, but in the context of global GDP it is not so much, a little under 1% I think, and we're talking about 100% of the emissions. To reduce them by the Kyoto accord's 5.2% (on 1990 levels) we'd be looking at $5bn or so, and that's for the whole world, not just developed countries.
So is this the easy option?
I think this cost must underestimate the true cost. I'm not entirely sure why but I think this is the reason.
As I understand it offsetting works in one of three ways. Either a) the CO2 you emit is offset by something like some trees being planted which magically sucks it in whilst you're in mid-air, b) the CO2 you emit is offset by someone else not emitting it because they have been paid not to, so for example they've not taken a plane flight, c) because the money you have spent has reduced their emissions through greater effiency, ie you've built them a new power station and taken away their old coal one.
Even when described fairly the offset companies are a bit sceptical about (a). So its (b) and (c) which actually do work. But there's only a certain amount of offsets that can be done in this way at this price. At the moment there are some very easy projects - replacing coal-fired power stations with gas ones, certain (apparently) types of cookers, closing down East European industry. So it might be the case that you or I can take a flight and get someone else to stop producing enough CO2 to offset it. But this can only happen because so few people do it. The cost represent by the offsets is not a measure of the damage done to the environment by C02 emissions (if such a thing can be measured) but the cost of getting someone else to cut down their emissions. On the margin this is easy, but it's not in aggregate.
Is that right?
posted by Matthew @ 8/08/2006 03:03:00 PM
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