Paying for your sins

Vancouverites are divided into those who have never heard of carbon offsets, those who already buy them and those who never want to hear about them again.

Boosters promote carbon offsets as an ingenious step toward sustainability, while skeptics call them a licence to pollute. The financial stakes are high: the global carbon offset trade is estimated to be worth US$4 billion by 2010. But are offsets worth the price?

An offset is basically a voluntary carbon tax. Each time you fly in an airplane, take a cruise or pay your heating bill, you can donate to an organization that will compensate for the resulting greenhouse gases by, say, investing in a solar-energy project that replaces the burning of kerosene.

Theoretically, if you were to offset everything from your air travel to the methane belched by the cow destined for your steak dinner, you could boast the virtuous state of being “carbon neutral.” The trouble is, no one really knows whether carbon offsets can help slow down global warming.

I recently met an environmentalist who joked that he was in the business of selling sin. Despite his rueful tone, he believed in his work at a Vancouver-based carbon offset organization. But he admitted that offsets are akin to the way the Catholic Church once let people make up for their misdeeds by shelling out cash. Donations for projects that reduce carbon emissions are great, but meanwhile, the environmental damage is done.

The benefits of offsets may seem dubious if you look into the more controversial projects. Last year Air Canada partnered with Zerofootprint, an organization that is using most of its offset revenues to plant trees in the Maple Ridge area. What’s wrong with planting trees? Nothing, except that trees need about 80 years to absorb the gases that Air Canada customers are paying $16 a tonne to offset today – but scientists say we need a turnaround of global carbon emissions in 10 to 15 years.

Most offset projects are in developing countries, where it’s relatively cheap to replace wood-burning ovens or coal-generated electricity with solar or wind power. The downside is that emission reductions in the developing world are harder to track. And shouldn’t Canadians be dealing with our ever-expanding carbon footprints in our own backyard?

A couple of Vancouver-based outfits are doing just that. Offsetters Climate Neutral Society used to partner only with international projects, but it is now working on ground-source heat

Another, much smaller, organization works exclusively on local projects. The Vancouver Renewable Energy Cooperative uses its offset program to subsidize solar electricity and solar hot-water systems in regional housing cooperatives. But because of the high cost of alternative energy technologies in Canada, its offsets are expensive, at $40 per tonne of emissions. In contrast, cheaper international ventures allow Offsetters to charge just $21 per tonne. (The average Canadian generates about five tonnes of greenhouse gases each year.)
International projects have the potential to offset more emissions for less money, while local ventures may slowly transform how Canadians use and think about energy. That’s why, in my mind, an ideal offset program would include both.

Clearly, offsets aren’t a panacea for our global warming woes. But I buy them anyway, and so do esteemed groups such as the David Suzuki Foundation (which buys them only from energy-efficiency and renewable-energy projects).

The most compelling argument I’ve heard for offsets is that the act of calculating your emissions for a given flight or commute draws attention to the invisible gases we produce each day. As well, offset projects create a market for energy- efficient technologies that might otherwise be too expensive, compared to fossil-fuel-dependant systems. This draws
sustainable energy into the mainstream, which should help lower the price.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need offsets because we’d all refrain from belching so many emissions in the first place. But progress is more attainable than perfection, after all. And offsets, though flawed, are a worthy tool along the way.

Adriana Barton is a reporter at the Globe and Mail and has written for magazines including Utne, enRoute and BCBusiness.