The idea of offsetting is probably familiar to you: we all do things that cause the emission of greenhouse gases (travelling is a prime example). Jumping on a plane increases GHG emissions and that increases the impacts of climate change. But heating your home or eating almost anything has a carbon footprint too. Very roughly speaking, a third of your carbon emissions are likely to be travel, a third heating and a third eating and other purchases (very very roughly).
If you travel a lot by plane or car, if you eat a lot of meat, if your home is draughty and needs a lot of heating, then your carbon footprint would be higher than average, perhaps much higher than average.
You and I, in the wealthy West, have much higher per capita average emissions than most people in the world. What do you think the UK average annual per capita GHG emission is? It’s around 7 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. That compares with 0.1 tonnes in Mali and 44 tonnes in Qatar.
The best way to cut down these emissions is to do rather less – but that has other impacts.
One way to feel better about your emissions is to offset them. That means do something, or pay someone else to do something, that will capture carbon that your actions are allowing to go into the atmosphere. This is quite a good idea but not anywhere near as good as not causing the emissions in the first place.
If you plant a tree then it grows, sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere – and you can think that that is the CO2 that your actions put in there.
There are problems with offsetting – just imagine we all ramp up our carbon emissions fork out the money for offsets – it wouldn’t be long before we ran out of land to plant trees and then we’d have to cut emissions properly. But at the margin, emissions with offsets are better than emissions without offsets so let’s see how much it would cost us for a lifetime offset.
This is a very rough idea of what it would look like.
If you and I are average UK citizens we are responsible (or irresponsible) for emissions of c 7 tonnes CO2/year. We live for, say, 80 years. That’s 560 tonnes. Carbon offsets cost a wide range of sums but let’s say £10/tonne CO2. That’s c£5,500 for your lifetime emissions and that is on the harsh side as that pays for all your emissions and surely it’s guilt free to have some emissions?
I know quite a lot of rich birders who could afford £5,000 easily enough, and even though some of them are doing so much air travel that the figure should really be £15,000 that would still be within their means.
Maybe rich couples with children should switch their Child Benefit into carbon offsetting? Or maybe government should simply do it for them?
But, as I say, don’t get too keen on the idea as a way to salve your conscience – to make car travel in the UK carbon neutral we would need to cover three quarters of the UK with trees.
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Can’t believe offsetting does much good, and may do lots of harm at times. Reducing your consumption is the only way. The comparison per head of UK vs Mali is very telling. Travel less (and in lower energy ways), insulate your home and eat less meat. If we want a high consumption lifestyle we need to reduce our population. Consume less, have fewer children. It’s not clever fixes which are needed, it’s the willingness to do the right thing.
Unfortunately it is clever fixes we need. The comparison with Mali is indeed very telling. I have spent some time there (yes, I flew) and the majority of the population there lives in great poverty and even the most virtuous of environmentalists would be reluctant to pare down their lifestyles to even approach the frugality of the life of a typical Malian villager. Therein lies the problem: around the World poor people such as those in Mali understandably and justifiably aspire to have their living standards raised to approach those they see richer countries enjoying whilst very few people in Europe, Qatar or North America are prepared to make anything like the inroads into their own consumption needed to offset the rise in the carbon footprint of poorer countries seeking to achieve ‘western’ standards of living. Mali is nowhere near achieving such an aspiration but over recent years we have seen phenomenal economic growth in India and especially China which has consequently leapt to the very top of the carbon emitters league table. Most other countries are keen to emulate China.
I completely agree that we should insulate our homes properly, consume less and seek to travel as efficiently as possible but it is naive to think that we can persuade enough people to make sufficient reductions in their consumption to make the difference that is needed. We therefore do need clever fixes as well. Off-setting may have a part to play in this although it clearly has its limitations (and in the worst cases is just a fig leaf).
Reluctantly, I’m with Dr Parry on this. Clever fixes might make a difference to climate change and, of course, living clever is always better than acting stupid. But when it comes to the destruction of the natural world, enough people and enough consumption will do the job however many clever fixes are brought in.
As you say, enough people and enough consumption will do the job when it comes to the destruction of the natural world. There are currently around 7 billion of us who are doing just that and far from seeking to reduce their consumption the majority of them (us) are hell bent on increasing it and that includes people in countries that already have high per capita consumption. Trying to persuade enough of those people to cut back on their resource use enough to make a difference to the problems we face has a vanishingly small probability of success if it is not accompanied by clever fixes whatever they may be – technology, tax regimes that incentivize efficiency, off-setting and so on. I am definitely not saying that we should not bother trying to encourage people to reduce their environmental footprint – we should – but we have to be realistic and recognize that most people don’t wish to wear hair shirts and if we don’t find ways of ensuring that doing the right thing is not just the virtuous choice but also the self-interested one we will never succeed.
The UK has, according to official figures, succeeded in reducing its carbon emissions but that is largely due to technology – especially the switch from coal to gas for electricity generation, not because most or even many people have sought to curb their consumption for environmental reasons. Improved insulation in homes and more efficient boilers have also helped reduce energy use for domestic heating but, while many people will have felt pleasantly green as a result of installing such improvements I am pretty sure that the chief motivation was the prospect of cheaper bills (as well as any grant support they may have received for the work to be done).
PS I come to this conclusion as reluctantly as you came to yours! I would love to believe that we could reach ‘single planet’ levels of consumption purely by persuading people to do so in the interest of future generations, people living on low lying oceanic islands on the other side of the world and the protection of wildlife but I don’t think that is likely to happen and certainly not quickly enough to avert many of the expected problems.
JW – I pretty much agree with what you say, but I also go along with Jane Goodall when she said that the greatest threat to the natural world is agriculture, not climate change. For example, the wildlife of the upper Ganges and Indus valleys has been devastated by people with very meagre lifestyles (and with tiny carbon footprints) compared with ours – but they do have to eat.
For me, the snag with clever fixes is that they fool us into thinking we’re doing more good that we really are. Even worse, if they also save us money that just enables us to increase our consumption of other things.
Also, I think a major factor in the apparent reductions in carbon emissions in the UK and US is the export of heavy industry to other countries, notably China.
I think if we’re realistic the future for the natural world is pretty bleak. I try not to be too realistic.
Alan, I completely agree that poor people eking out a living in places such as the Indus valley can have a calamitous impact on the environment through factors such as deforestation, soil erosion and so on. Clearly as a species we have multiple ways in which we are simultaneously fouling our own nest and pushing other species towards extinction. But in a way the same point applies – the poor farmers of the Indus Valley or of the Sahel are not going to turn to more sustainable practices just as a result of environmentalists telling them they need to in order to save the environment. They need ‘clever fixes’ to help them to make the switch.
I should make clear here that what I mean by ‘clever fix’ is something that genuinely helps to solve a problem – if it is simply a superficial trick that just makes us feel good without really making a difference for the better I don’t think it can be said to be clever.
Like you I find it hard to be optimistic at times but I guess we have to keep on trying. One thing I am sure of – there is no single solution to the problems we face and we should be prepared to try and to support a variety of different approaches in order to make progress.
the majority of the population there lives in great poverty – I probable live in poverty compared to you but it does not mean I am unhappy! It all comes down to how you think. My Mali friend has 100 cattle so he thinks he is rich. His cattle are destroying the very habitat that stops the sand from blowing. So our birds are less likely to arrive back in Britain making us poor for lack of diversity!
I made no mention of the happiness of Malian people – or of the inhabitants of anywhere else. I certainly met many Malians who seemed to be happy. The point I was making is that very few people from our part of the world would be prepared to voluntarily reduce their consumption levels and their possessions to that of a typical Malian. Do you think that is not true?
I don’t know how frugal your life is or care if you are richer or poorer than me but looking around at the typical British person – which you are probably not – they seem to be pretty keen on having holidays, owning smartphones, shopping (just see the queues of cars trying to get to the Metro Centre in Gateshead of a Saturday morning), driving fancy cars and so on – not really keen to adopt the ascetic life for environmental reasons. It would be marvellous if it were otherwise but we are kidding ourselves if we think that is at all likely.
Offsetting through World Land Trust’s scheme (Mark’s a Trustee of WLT) certainly does no harm : http://www.worldlandtrust.org/eco-services/carbon-balanced as it is aimed at saving biodiversity. I certainly agree the reproducing yourself (which I have not done) is potentially the highest carbon emitting activity you can indulge in. I like the idea of rich (and not so rich)_ carbon off-setting future generations …..
One can of course reduce one’s travelling and turn down the central heating at any time but you can’t un-have your children!
Which is precisely why it’s so important a choice. And who’s to say how many children they might have? And we all live long (high consumption) lives, so it’s a supertanker of a problem to change – v.slow.
Lets all have no children then,that will certainly be the final solution.
No abstainers allowed.
Of course you can. You just have them adopted by someone else. It’s fully explained in Ed Davey’s Big Book of Climate Change Mitigation, for which he was mitigated with a Knighthood
I see offsetting as the thing you do after you’ve done all you can to minimise your emissions in the first place. In other words, offsetting addressing the genuinely unavoidable residual emissions we’re all responsible for even with the best will in the world.
You can go online and find various personal carbon emission calculators. You can use these to work out how your various lifestyle activities lead to emissions, and those calculations help you to work out which emissions you can avoid and reduce. Then the calculator tells you what’s left – what emissions remain despite your best efforts.
You can either ignore those unavoidable, residual emissions, or you can take steps to offset them.
How do you offset those unavoidable emissions? Do what John Burton suggests in his comment above: go to the World Land Trust website:
http://www.worldlandtrust.org/eco-services/carbon-balanced
There are several calculators on the right side of the web page linked above for you to use. Your calculations are used to work out how much it’ll cost to address your residual emissions, and those emissions are addressed by saving or expanding habitats critical to the survival of globally-threatened wildlife.
It’s a brilliant way to do this: address your unavoidable emissions by saving globally outstanding wildlife habitats that are rich in carbon.
‘Rich’ people with children don’t get Child Benefit any more… or at least the government recovers it in tax.
Also applies to people on almost half the family income of some other recipients from whom it is not recovered due to the way the cut off works.