Carbon Offsets: sin or salvation?

Neither of course, but wait for it, I will get there.

Tom Papworth has been writing about carbon offsets, and issue of cap-and-trade versus carbon taxes.

As I have said here before, there is nothing wrong with the principle of offsetting carbon emissions, it is just as good or bad to cause a net emission of a tonne of carbon one way as another. It is quite absurd to suggest that emitting a tonne of carbon here is so irredeemably sinful, that it can't be redeemed by saving a tonne of carbon somewhere else. It is not like offsetting infidelity.

The practise of course is much murkier. The world can't be divided into segments such that each of use is solely responsible for one of them. Tom quotes the economist blog suggesting that "rebound effects" will undo some of the good of offsets spent on wind power. I think this objection is overstated - I would agree with comment 2 on that blog - and, perhaps more to the point, I don't imagine offsetting to be a very precise science in the first place.

Because as I have argued, carbon emissions are bad but not sinful, it follows that offsetting is good but not obligatory - it is superogatory to use the technical term. It is much like making a charitable donation. And of course this means it should compete for attention with other charities, and probably fail. But it does mean that we should be glad that our donation is doing some good, and not worry whether a "rebound effect" is trimming a few percent off. Of course if the rebound effect were big enough to cost most of the benefit, that would be much like the hypothetical charity that spend most of its income on administration - we would look for another charity.

Of course to be brutally frank, I don't think global warming is going to be solved by having a few motivated people make effectively charitable contributions towards offset schemes. I bring the subject up on a political blog because I think that some political action is merited.

Green taxes of course are one such measure, but I don't think they can be made high enough to do the whole job for a couple of reasons:

• demand for energy is not particularly elastic so the levels of tax would have to be very high to have big effects
• hardship would result for many people on low incomes - it is important that these people are helped, through for example, being the focus of the tax cuts paid for by the green taxes; but I admit this help won't be perfect
• there is the problem of competitiveness if domestic production is taxed and imports aren't; applying special taxes to imports to compensate for some (perceived) domestic disadvantage is the sort of thing that upsets trade wonks terribly. But it would need to be done if the effect of the policy isn't simply to be the offshoring of production and therefore of carbon emissions.

So, actually, Tom, as well as green taxes, a bit of "pork" poured into green energy is just what I would like to see. The technology works, and if it can be made cost competitive the market will do the rest. And, once the technology is competitive, or nearly so, international agreements on reducing carbon emissions will be much easier to reach.

Carbon Offset standards to rise

This story caught my eye because there is a lot of rot talked about carbon offsetting. I am delighted that there is going to be a stricter standard because, for various practical reasons, it is not clear that offsetting today does an awful lot of good.

However I would first like to deal with the common objection in principle to offsetting, that frequently is heard from the environmentalist left: that offsetting is wrong because it allows people to carry on polluting rather than thinking about reducing their carbon footprint.

On the face of it, this position is merely inexplicable and incoherent. If you clean up after yourself, what is the problem? Pooper scoops are wrong because they encourage people to let their dogs poop in the park? I have argued before that carbon emission shouldn't be considered sinful, but even if they are, redemption is available. So the anti-offset lobby views carbon emissions as not just sinful but irredeemable. And why? It is your net emissions that do the damage. Soak up the carbon, or otherwise undo the harm, and you have undone the harm.

The next objection is this: offsets allow the rich to carry on polluting while the poor will have to do without. This is true of more or less every product on the market, not just offsets. You may not like it, I don't particularly like it, but lets not pretend that this is something wrong with the concept of offsetting. If the fact that not everybody can afford something makes that thing wrong, then everything we buy is wrong, including all public services. What nonsense. And to insist that it is a bad idea for some people to undo the harm they do, simply because not everybody could do the same? Worse than nonsense.

No, this objection to offsetting comes from a shift in values away from not damaging the environment and towards self-denial. If self-denial rocks your boat then go for it, but please don't mis-sell it to the rest of us.

However, principles aside, offsetting has its problems. How do you account for the carbon benefit of a renewable energy project? How do you account for tree-planting, particularly if it was going to happen anyway? How do you know the scheme is honest? Newsnight's ethical man blog carries lengthy tortuous comment-debate over how to account for the benefit, if any, of his green electricity tariff.

I've not done any offsetting yet. I was about to at one point, but the price demanded was so low, I concluded that it was probably impossible to buy extra carbon capture at that price. Of course had it been high enough I may have balked at the price. And in any case, I have a normal consumer's skepticism regarding the chances that a website asking for money is on the level. Standards needed.