WITH CLIMATE Action week behind us and still fresh in our minds (for those who noticed), I thought it was about time we all had a jolly good look at what is perhaps the most lucrative and best-executed consumer scams of the 21st Century. I’m not referring to sub-prime mortgages or Dasani water (remember that?), rather the practice known as ‘carbon offsetting’.
The idea behind it is that the CO2 released when you use a car or a plane can be mitigated by a device that captures it. Trees are the most popular option because not only do they capture CO2 floating around in the air, they use that gas to make oxygen with. This is a good thing. Let’s say you go on holiday, and you take a plane there. The amount of CO2 that the plane releases into the atmosphere is worked out for each journey, and that incurs a cost. That cost is paid to a carbon offsetting company who will usually plant a number of trees equivalent to the amount of CO2 your plane journey has released, thus neutralising the environmental impact. Simple, no?
So far, so green, but here’s the problem. Your money, which you’ve so thoughtfully given for the environment, isn’t actually being used to do anything. Forest owners who engage in carbon offsetting don’t actually have to do anything to be able to say they are offsetting your carbon. Their forest will continue to grow, trap CO2 and release oxygen, with or without your generous contribution. And I do mean generous. Average prices are around £10 per tonne, which doesn’t sound like a lot until it’s revealed that a one-way flight to Spain is half a tonne. Multiplied by three to account for the increased elevation, of course. So a return to Spain becomes 3 tonnes of CO2, or £30 slapped on the price of your holiday. Almost £1.2 billion was made last year by carbon offsetters.
So if nothing’s being done with our money, why do people continue to buy into it? There are some who think that their money is being used proactively to combat climate change, but I reckon the real reason a good deal of us still pay for this swindle is a tad more sinister. And it starts with the iPod.
In recent years there has been a reaction against the exclusively materialist lifestyles of the Western world. Whilst I don’t entirely agree with the sentiments – I still like having stuff – the extremes of wealth and poverty are appalling. This toning down of naked consumerism is to be welcomed, and I do believe it started with the iPod. After people realised what a trivial and pointless gadget it is, they saw that their lavish lifestyles were having a detrimental effect on the world. Some of us have been saying this for years, of course, but hey ho.
However, people still need their fashion, and minimalism is hard to package and sell. With the rise of environmentalism, people have looked towards it for a new source of trends and have found one in the form of carbon offsetting. Trading emissions has become the new black, as it were, purchased and espoused by the nauseatingly hip types who buy designer baby wear and drive hybrid cars, feeling unaccountably smug while doing so. It’s the subject of talk at trendy Camden dinner parties, a way for people with more money than sense to show off their wealth to us common folk. It’s the Palace of Versailles for the ‘haut bourgeois’ to make us feel small and worthless by comparison.
Unfortunately it doesn’t stop there, and the results are even more obscene. The official adoption of ‘carbon credits’ by the government, whereby low polluting businesses can sell ‘spare’ emissions to high polluting ones, has led to a bizarre reversal of what you’d expect. Last year, BP and ESSO made £300 million profit for selling carbon credits. £300 million for doing nothing, and I cannot stress enough. In contrast, almost 70 percent of NHS trusts in England and Wales cited the mandatory purchase of carbon credits as the main reason they had budget deficits. Quite how we’ve reached the absurd situation of an oil giant selling pollution rights to a hospital boggles the mind.
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