ACT BLOG: Puppy Offsetting
If I kick puppies as part of my daily life, is it okay to make up for it in other ways? I could take person x for example, who works in a dog shelter and I could pay them money to look after twice as many puppies as they usually would, this would make up for the ones I hurt. I could even pay them to look after four times the amount of puppies than they usually would, one puppy hurt, four puppies helped. It would leave me in canine kicking credit. Surely, as I have overall helped more dogs than I have hurt, I am actually an asset to the animal kingdom.
I would imagine this line of argument would not get me very far around the dinner table (especially not round a tofu chilli sans carne in Brighton). If any of the guests remained for desert then I would imagine that they would point out flaws in my logic. If I were really committed to dog wellbeing (which assuming from my kind donations I am) I should concentrate on trying not to kick them in the first place rather than just carrying on and paying someone else to deal with the consequences.
This is where my problem lies with carbon offsetting. The idea of carbon offsetting, for anyone that has spent the last few years in a shoe box buried in the back garden, is that you pay for emission reductions in other areas to compensate for the amount of emissions that you produce. A typical example is paying a company to plant trees for you in Brazil so that the amount of carbon you produce is compensated for by the trees. The fact that the industry is generally unregulated and produces questionable results I will leave for someone else to deal with.
Firstly, I would like to say that I am not calling into question the motivation of people that offset their carbon, it is better that they are doing so than not doing so. It is just that the whole idea of offsetting suggests that as long as you have enough money you can pay for someone else to deal with your responsibilities. It also means that you can continue living the same lifestyle as before.
I recently saw for sale an area of woodland in Sussex that was for the sole purpose of offsetting your carbon emissions. It claimed that the carbon exchanged by the trees in the area of woodland would allow you to drive your car and run your house while staying carbon neutral. My problem with this is that the new owner would now be under the impression that driving their car as much as they liked and running their house as normal is fine now that the trees have them covered.
The other thing that puzzled me with this deal is that the woodland in question would be filtering the same amount of carbon dioxide regardless of whether anyone owned it or not. By the looks of it, it had been happily turning carbon dioxide into oxygen for the last 150 years or so. By buying this woodland precisely no carbon reduction has been made to the country overall.
Also the buying of carbon offsets for air travel, as good old Tony Blair did swiftly once accused of excessive flying, is telling people that flights are fine as long as you plant some trees at the other end. We need to reduce superfluous flights to reduce carbon but if someone is saying just pay a bit more money and all that will be sorted then people are going to keep on living how they are living.
The whole idea of carbon offsetting is a dangerous one, it breeds complacency. It could be a useful tool if first combined with significant lifestyle changes. Sadly, it is not usually about solving the problem but about alleviating individual guilt while people continue their unsustainable lifestyles. It is also a quick and easy way for businesses to get some much needed green creds without making any important changes and it is about a series of ‘green offset’ companies cashing in on global climate change.
If you want to make a real difference then consume less. Walk to work, green your house, recycle more, do not fly short distances, these are the only ways that change is going to be effective, not shouldering the blame onto other people.
(No animals were hurt in the process of this article but a spider made me jump, it seems fine.)
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