TV “The Great Green Smoke Screen”.

Cardew

Surprised there has been no comment on the Dispatches programme on Channel 4 last night about Carbon Footprints entitled “The Great Green Smoke Screen”.

I believe it is being shown later very early morning – set your video.

Quite interesting if you believe in offsetting your Carbon Footprint.

A few points:

There is absolutely no consensus amongst scientists about how big your carbon footprint actually is. For flights, the estimates from the various firms can vary by a factor of Seven. i.e. one firm states 1 ton, another 7 tons.

The cost to offset per ton – with the same firm - varies according to which agency you buy from.

BP claimed on their website that they offset the carbon footprint of 750,000 cars by investing in a pig farm in Mexico(the methane from their er – manure! is trapped and burnt off). After investigations and some measurements it was agreed by BP that the correct figure was 2,500 cars. Website being changed!

If you have ‘Green Tariff’ electricity, that generating capacity is there anyway regardless if nobody was on a green tariff.

Perhaps the most surprising thing for me was paying for a tree to offset your carbon footprint. I rather naively thought your money actually bought a tree to be planted. Not so with the majority of schemes. The big schemes give some money to landowners who have existing forests that have been paid for by the Forestry Commission. These are existing commercially planted forests and no new trees are planted. The owner of one huge forest admitted the money wasn’t needed, but it was a nice bonus.

Similarly a Hydro Electric scheme in Bulgaria gets money from UK and you have supposedly offset your carbon footprint. Again it was an existing commercially viable scheme as the manager and bank admitted.

Not one single ‘Green’ activist interviewed seemed to think these schemes were environmentally sound. The term “you really can’t salve your conscience by giving someone money” struck a chord. Another said “its like paying someone to go on a diet for you”

However the directors of the firms in this money making industry stressed how vital they were to save the world!

As this is a money saving site, I can think of a good way to save my money!

tr3mor

Was it just me that thought the programme was an exercise in stating the bloody obvious?

People are stupid and tend to take the easiest option. These companies know this and make millions from it!

jordylass

I seen the programme and it certainly raised more questions than it answered.

I have never been able to get my head around the offsetting argument. I am completely unable to understand how one action can negate another.
I understand what it means. I fly and plant a tree and that tree will help to use up some carbon from flights. Surely the only way to negatively affect the balance would be to not fly and still plant a tree.

MORPH3US

Wanted to watch this but missed it, thanks very much for the quick run through!!!

I don't do any of the above because i'm tight with my money, but I do try and do everything that I can to help the environment so I might have done some of the things mentioned one day if I was feeling rich... won't bother now!

I guess its probably cheaper to take your own "offsetting" measures such as:

1. Buy and plant a tree yourself (you could probably do about 5 trees for the price the above would charge for one)

2. Replace lightbulbs with energy saving bulbs if not already

3. Save up for double glazing / cavity wall insulation / loft insulation etc

4. Treat yourself to a bike for going down to the shops / work etc

M

jordylass

MORPH3US - Mentioning double glazing, I was surprised when the woman went into the journalist house and told him how to reduce his footprint there, turning the heating down, replacing lightbulbs etc. I was quite surprised when she said about double glazing a window. I had read somewhere that it takes approx 15 years to get the value from double glazing that it's manufacture costs in energy.

Cardew

jordylass wrote: »

MORPH3US - Mentioning double glazing, I was surprised when the woman went into the journalist house and told him how to reduce his footprint there, turning the heating down, replacing lightbulbs etc. I was quite surprised when she said about double glazing a window. I had read somewhere that it takes approx 15 years to get the value from double glazing that it's manufacture costs in energy.

Nobody except a Double glazing salesman could ever pretend that DG could ever save money or be environmentally friendly.

Especially when the life of DG units is not that long before they 'blow' and require replacement.

Incidentally I must say I wasn't impressed with that girl at all - instant expert.

500yearvision

The whole point of science is that it's not a consensus.

What we have is the best available information at a point in time and science is about evolving knowledge.

Surely no-one would argue that it's better to do nothing, on the basis that we're not exactly sure right now what are carbon footprint would be?

There was a great item in the New Scientist about this issue (carbon offsetting), reprinted in Readers Digest.

In short, the best way of offsetting carbon is by providing technology to people who would not otherwise be able to afford it.

matt.forster_2

Heres the NewScientist article in question if anybody would like to read it.

It was a night for partying. Fireworks fizzed across the sky as half a million people celebrated Brisbane's annual Riverfestival last September. Then came a deafening roar. An Australian air force F1-11 swooped over the revellers, leaving behind a stream of flame hot enough to be felt below. Within a second it was gone, and cheers went up as the DJ announced the completion of the highlight of the evening, a "dump and burn".
The aircraft had jettisoned most of its fuel into the sky and ignited it. Later, the festival organisers announced that 300 trees had been planted outside the city to soak up the estimated 68 tonnes of greenhouse gases released by the stunt: dump, burn and offset.
That tree-planting was a small part of one of the fastest-growing businesses in the world: the sale of promises to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, often at bargain-basement prices, by planting forests or investing in renewable-energy projects. Some see carbon offsetting as the ultimate guilt-free solution to global warming, but New Scientist has found that this market in environmental absolution is remarkably unregulated and secretive, which leaves it open to deception and fraud. While we found no impropriety, the lack of transparency means it is often impossible to be sure that money invested in carbon offsetting makes the difference that is claimed for it.
There are two kinds of offset. Official offsets - sanctioned under the Kyoto protocol - allow governments and companies to earn carbon credits that can be traded on markets such as the Chicago Climate Exchange. Most such projects are carried out in developing countries under the protocol's "clean development mechanism". They have their detractors, but they are at least controlled by tight rules and a complex bureaucracy aimed at preventing fraud.
Then there is the burgeoning unofficial sector - an army of charitable and profit-making bodies that charge a fee to organise offsets on your behalf. This sector cannot confer Kyoto credits and is not bound by the protocol's rules, yet it is the route that many companies have chosen so they can make claims about their green credentials. It has also opened the door to private individuals who want to offset their emissions.
Though still much smaller than the Kyoto sector, which has so far committed to offset 740 million tonnes of CO2, voluntary offsets have grown from 3 million tonnes in 2004 to somewhere between 20 and 50 million tonnes in 2006. In all, more than 30 organisations across the developed world now sell voluntary offsets. Simply go online, calculate your emissions from flying, running your car or running your life, and cleanse your environmental sins at the click of a mouse.
How much CO2?

Buying offsets may assuage your guilt, but does it actually work? The answer is a resounding maybe. According to a study by offsets expert Mark Trexler for environment group Clean Air-Cool Planet, based in New Hampshire: "There are no widely accepted standards as to what qualifies as an offset. Almost anyone can offer to sell you almost anything and claim that this purchase will make you carbon neutral."
What's more, says Trexler, "many retail offset marketers provide little information about where the money is being spent or what criteria are used to select the reductions they sell." Most do not make clear that the offset will usually accrue only over many years, during the growing period of the tree or the working life of the energy project your money went towards. This is unlike Kyoto projects, which have strict time criteria. Few offer customers the chance to invest in specific projects and follow their progress. Among other things, this leads to the possibility that offsets might be sold more than once, says Trexler. In February, Amsterdam-based lobby group Transnational Institute went as far as to claim that offsets companies engaged in "Enron-style accounting".
The uncertainty starts at the first click, as you try to establish how much CO2 you are responsible for. I chose a random set of online calculators and plugged in the details of my return flight from London to Brisbane. I picked The CarbonNeutral Company, based in London; Climate Care, based in Oxford, UK; and German offsetter Atmosfair. Surely they could agree on the emissions? They couldn't. The calculators produced figures ranging from 1.8 tonnes of CO2 with CarbonNeutral through 5.4 tonnes with Climate Care to a staggering 12.5 tonnes with Atmosfair.
To be fair, there are good reasons why the numbers disagree. Aircraft emissions are complex, and their impact on the atmosphere even more so. CO2 emissions from flights are easy to calculate: burning a tonne of aircraft fuel produces 3.15 tonnes of CO2. However, aircraft also emit nitrogen oxides and water vapour. The water can make contrails that form heat-trapping clouds. The nitrogen oxides create ozone, a greenhouse gas, but one that sometimes destroys another, methane. All these reactions vary with temperature, altitude and whether it is day or night.
So the offset companies generally try to integrate all these emissions from aircraft into a single measure of warming, calculated as the equivalent of so many tonnes of CO2. There is an ongoing scientific debate about how to do this, however. In 1999 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed on a multiplier of 2.7. More recent research suggests a figure of 1.9. The offset organisations have yet to agree. Atmosfair multiplies by 3; Climate Care by 2. CarbonNeutral goes on actual CO2 alone.
Nor is that the end of the differences between offsetters. Each takes its own view of exactly what share of the aircraft emissions you as a passenger are responsible for. Climate Care assumes 100 per cent seat occupancy, but others plump for a more typical 80 per cent. For long-haul flights, Climate Care also ascribes 10 per cent of emissions to freight rather than passengers, further reducing your share of the emissions.
There is also a big difference in price. Atmosfair charges £13 to offset a tonne of CO2, while Climate Care and CarbonNeutral both claim to do the same job for around £7.50. The end result is that, to offset my flights to Brisbane and back, I could pay £165 to Atmosfair, £40 to Climate Care or a bargain £13.30 to CarbonNeutral. The companies say their prices are a fair reflection of the cost of their projects, but it is hard not to conclude they are competing on price.
Is it better to pay more or to pay less? It's hard to say. The truth is that you cannot know at the time of purchase whether your investment will reap an environmental dividend, since most offset projects only deliver returns over many decades. You are effectively buying offset futures.
"Is it better to pay more or less for offsets? It's hard to say"
Take tree plantations, which account for most of the voluntary offset money spent so far, greening an estimated 4 million hectares. Brisbane's F1-11 released its emissions in less than a second, but the trees planted to offset it will reabsorb CO2 only gradually, over about three decades - if all goes well. And it may not go well. All around Brisbane at that time, trees were dying in Australia's worst drought in 1000 years. It is anyone's guess whether the offset trees will fare better.
The uncertainty over tree planting was dramatically highlighted when rock group Coldplay vowed to offset emissions from the production of their 2002 album A Rush of Blood to the Head. They paid for 10,000 mango trees to be planted in India. Accounts differ, but something went badly wrong and around 4000 of the trees died.
Even successful tree projects do not live forever. Eventually they die, rot and yield up their carbon. Read the small print and offset companies mostly promise to maintain their forests for 99 years. There is a certain logic to this. It is roughly equivalent to the amount of time an average molecule of CO2 released into the air will last before it is reabsorbed by nature. The result of the offset, then, is not to negate the emission so much as time-shift it. Rather than hanging round in the atmosphere through this century, that tonne of offset CO2 will instead inhabit the next.
This is problematic. It is just possible that by the 22nd century the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will be lower than today, in which case this time-shift will have been useful. More likely the offset CO2 will be released back into an atmosphere already choked with the gas, giving an extra push to global warming. Future generations may not thank us for our forest offsets.
Making matters worse

There are other concerns about forest schemes. They may dry out soils or release methane, negating the gains from stored CO2. Outside the tropics, dark forest canopy often absorbs more heat than the growing timber can offset and so in fact exacerbates global warming. Large forest projects also have a nasty habit of creating social conflict by turfing poor people off their land.
It is perhaps no wonder that most offset companies are now getting out of the trees business. Whatever the theoretical benefits of tree planting, they say, the burdens of long-term monitoring and verification, and the potential for disputes, are just too great.
So what are the alternatives? For most offset companies, plan B is to invest in green energy projects such as wind turbines, solar panels, and energy-efficient light bulbs and cooking stoves. "Funding energy projects is intuitively better [than forests] because it stops pollution, rather than soaking it up later, and you are contributing to a wider move away from fossil fuels," says Mike Buick of Climate Care.
However, these projects raise their own set of dilemmas. Most critical is the question of "additionality". In other words, has the project really added something to what would have happened anyway? If so, how much?
Many countries are already reducing their reliance on fossil fuels and adopting energy efficiency as a matter of course, so offsetters have to demonstrate that what they are doing is additional to that. If they are installing solar panels in an Indian village, say, they need to show that this would not have happened without their intervention. They also have to produce a plausible calculation showing how much wood or fossil fuel the villagers would have burned without the panels.
The trouble is that nobody can be sure about the future. Even apparently copper-bottomed additionality can spring a leak. In 2005, for example, Climate Care funded the distribution of free energy-efficient light bulbs in a slum in Cape Town, South Africa, and sold the offset emissions. Yet a few months later, power company Eskom responded to blackouts with an energy-saving programme that involved distributing similar bulbs in the same township.
"Disagreements over additionality underlie most disputes about the quality of offsets," says Trexler. So it's no wonder that a consortium of environmental groups, including WWF, has now set up a certification scheme called the Gold Standard, which aims to verify claims of additionality. But while it has made inroads in the official Kyoto sector, a simplified version for the voluntary sector has not yet attracted many applicants.
One sensible test applied by the Gold Standard is to ask if the offset project makes economic sense in its own right, regardless of environmental benefits. If not, then the chances are it would not have happened, and therefore qualifies as additional. But this means that the projects where it is easiest to demonstrate additionality are also the most expensive, and so probably the least cost-effective: fewer tonnes of CO2 will be saved for every dollar spent.
An alternative approach is to find cost-effective projects that are stuck on the starting blocks for want of capital. Climate Care funds many such small-scale energy projects among poor communities in developing countries. "If the people don't have capital and you can put it in, then additionality is clear," says Buick, citing in particular spending on cleaner-burning cooking stoves in India.
Yet even these schemes are controversial. Many governments in the developing world worry about the probity of letting rich nations carrying out carbon offsetting in their countries - they call it CO2lonialism. One day soon, countries like India, China and Brazil will probably have to accept their own limits on emissions. At that point, they may discover that the easiest, cheapest offset options have already been used up by western companies.
For that reason and others, many offsetters want to fund projects closer to home. Here the logic of additionality becomes even more difficult. The question is: can you claim additionality if you offset in countries that are already legally bound to reduce emissions under the Kyoto protocol? You would think not, yet many offsetters do precisely that. CarbonNeutral, for instance, has forestry projects in the UK and Germany and funds a wind farm in New Zealand. CO2 Balance, based in Somerset, UK, buys land in the UK and France on which to plant trees. The Woodland Trust also funds tree planting in the UK by selling offsets. The danger in this is that governments with Kyoto obligations will claim these voluntary offsets as part of their official efforts to reduce emissions, so that the voluntary sector ends up doing the work of the official one using private money that was invested in good faith.
That's not to suggest that these projects are illegitimate or deceitful. The Kyoto protocol includes a mechanism called joint implementation, which allows Kyoto countries to invest in others' offset projects. Even so, it's difficult to guarantee additionality in such schemes. To avoid confusion, some offsetters do not fund projects in countries with legally binding Kyoto targets. Climate Care for one has called on governments with Kyoto targets not to count voluntary offset projects as part of their compliance activity.
What does seem fair criticism is that efforts to portray offsets as simple, quick fixes pose serious questions of both commercial and ecological legitimacy. Sceptics argue there is no substitute for cutting emissions. For them, "dump, burn and offset" is the worst possible outcome. In February a radical group called London Rising Tide occupied the office of CarbonNeutral, accusing the company of creating a "smokescreen" behind which corporations will be able to keep increasing emissions. That is a political judgement rather than a scientific one - as far as the climate is concerned, a tonne of CO2 pulled out of the atmosphere is as good as a tonne of CO2 that never entered it - but the group still has a point. Buying an offset implies a degree of certainty that we do not have.
At the very least there is an urgent need for regulation so that - as British environment secretary David Miliband put it when announcing plans for oversight of voluntary offsets - "people can be sure that the way they offset is actually making a difference."

From issue 2594 of New Scientist magazine, 09 March 2007, page 38-41

http://environment.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2594/25941801.jpg
http://environment.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2594/25941802.jpg

Cardew

matt.forster
Thanks for the Reference.

The TV programme used exactly the same example of a Londo-Brisbane flight as below:

The end result is that, to offset my flights to Brisbane and back, I could pay £165 to Atmosfair, £40 to Climate Care or a bargain £13.30 to CarbonNeutral. The companies say their prices are a fair reflection of the cost of their projects, but it is hard not to conclude they are competing on price.

The thrust of the programme, as I saw it, was that these schemes are disingenuous at best, and fraud at worse.

How is it possible to 'sell' the same tree to 2 different people.

As the New Scientist states:

At the very least there is an urgent need for regulation

moonrakerz

Google "Carbon Offsetting" - 1,900,000 hits -probably more by the time you read this.
Boy, is there money to be made on this !!

Buy a tree and plant it, watch it grow. Cut it down (let it die of old age), use it, sooner or later it will decompose into its constituent parts, a large percentage of which is carbon. The more trees you plant the more carbon you will eventually release into the atmosphere.

This assumes, of course, that you believe all the hype about carbon being the mother of all evils - which I am still somewhat cynical about !

moonrakerz

I have just re-googled "carbon offsetting" - 1,910,000 hits !!!!!!!