Carbon Offset Ethics

Have you ever stopped to consider how ethical it is to pay someone else to compensate for the emissions you are responsible for?  In effect, offsets offer a way of buying yourself a clean conscience by paying others to undo the harm you are causing.  Thus, I had a chuckle recently when I came across an innovative English pair who have taken this market proven concept and applied it to the tricky and often rocky realm of human relationships.  On their website called CheatNeutral, these two students offer to offset your sexual infidelity by paying someone else to maintain a faithful relationship and not cheat.  Under the heading, “Can I offset all my cheating?” CheatNeutral offers the following advice, “First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating.  Once you've done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating.”

This clever critique of carbon offsetting strikes to the heart of a very real debate.  After all, as demonstrated by a few cavalier corporations, carbon offsetting in some cases only buys a clean conscience, without really changing behaviour to reduce emissions.

Funnily enough, this is not the first time that such sordid schemes have been sold to unsuspecting consumers.  In his book The Rise of the Dutch Republic published in 1855, John Lothrop Motley describes the means by which the people of the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries could redeem their sins.  Basically, priests were making small fortunes by granting God’s forgiveness for already committed or about to be committed sins.  Advertised on a graduated tariff, for the correct price you could be pardoned for poisoning, incest, perjury and even murder (if of course a means other than poison was used).

Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister, lie and kill without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you hand over your hard earned to one of the many companies selling indulgences.  Problem solved!

So exactly what is it about carbon offsets that attract so much criticism?  Don’t get me wrong here, not every offset scheme is a scam and there are plenty that are legitimately reducing emissions.  However, in many cases, emission reductions are extremely difficult to quantify.  For instance, exactly how much CO2 does a tree absorb and over what time frame?  If you plant a tree, should you get credits over its entire lifetime or just a short period?  Further, many offset projects would have gone ahead anyway regardless of whether they accrue offset money.  Thus, these projects do not actually reduce total emissions.

To bring this subject into a modern day context, would you prefer to support drink drivers as long as they sponsored others to attend a defensive driving course.  Or rather, would you prefer they just not get behind the wheel while intoxicated in the first place?  Interestingly, one person interviewed on the CheatNeutral website noted that it would be much better to just stop people cheating, rather than try and compensate for their actions after the event.

So while we continue to back the schemes that allow us to persist in our polluting ways and take a business as usual attitude towards climate change, spare a thought for author George Monbiot who noted, "You can now buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction.  But you cannot buy the survival of the planet."

Comments

[offset]

hmmm. goood information.... you tried to out something in my mind...... good though...
best of luck

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[Pabs]

Very interesting subject. Whilst the "can I offset my cheating?" analogy provides for an interesting anecdote it serves to obscure the real issues here.

When considering the question of whether it is ethical to offset you really need to consider the regulator framework through which the offsets are verified and the broader regulatory framework in which those offsets are being generated and utilised. Unfortunately in Australia we are falling behind other progressive nations such as the 27 countries in the EU who have been operating within an emissions cap since the first phase of the EU ETS began in 2005. In such a situation where a sector wide cap exists the use of verified offsets is a legitimate means of driving investment in emission reductions and maximising the amount of emission reductions for each dollar of investment. In the broader sense, the use of personal emission offsets that are certified to demonstrate that they achieve real, verifiable emission reductions can be a powerful means of driving investment in activities that would otherwise not be financially viable.

So instead of asking "can I offset my cheating?" you should be asking: "Can I maintain a monogamous relationship in a society where everyone cheats?"

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