Okay, so what if you’re carbon neutral?
Joel Makower has a great commentary about the whole “carbon neutral” bandwagon and how every corporation wants to jump on. The problem, he says, is we don’t really have a standard definition of what the term means, meaning any company can make the stretch by calling themselves or their services carbon neutral. He fears the rush to use the term as a marketing tool will water down the meaning, and at the same time discourage what we really need to do: reduce our energy consumption. Makower has a great anology, comparing a company claiming that a service is carbon neutral to a person who orders a Diet Coke with their Big Mac and Fries. The idea is to reduce calories, not just offset them. Are we doing ourselves a disservice by using claims of carbon neutrality as an excuse for our excess consumption? It’s worth the four-minute read.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:28 am
This argument seems similar to an individual saying that they have reduced their carbon footprint by trading in their SUV for a new hybrid. (This frequently offered as the number 1 reduction option?) Yes, you have certainly reduced your personal carbon emissions, but it is the overall emissions in the atmosphere that are driving climate change. Your trade-in will in all likelyhood go back out on the road, while you add to its emissions those now also released by the hybrid, in total increasing the carbon entering the atmosphere through your actions. To truly reduce your footprint you must de-commission the SUV, ie put it out of service, -not trade it in like I did with my van 5 years back. The other alternative being to somehow transform the SUV into a hybrid or an electric, if that is an option in your region. If not, once decommissioned, I would strongly suggest you explore public transit options, live your life closer to home if possible, and get on the politician’s and the media’s case about all these topics, and bring them up in conversations with those immediately around you. Its not an easy sell, but we learn as we go.
January 24th, 2007 at 10:13 am
Tyler,
One thing I haven’t seen pointed out is that this is almost exactly the same problem as with the word ’sustainability’ itself: there is no definition anyone agrees on, and very often there’s seriously flawed studies backing up generalised assertions of sustainability. Joel is making a great point here and one hit on in the geoexchange conference in November – absent a definition, absent performance monitoring and rigorous data gathering, every building becomes a green one. Or is it just energy performance savings? Further than that, who owns the reduction if we all agree to trade it?
Thanks as always for an interesting blog.
January 24th, 2007 at 11:55 am
Indeed! For instance- Who will get the carbon coupons when all those hybrids are purchased? Will it be Toyota, for building them, or the new owners for buying? If it is to be split, how to determine that ratio? And what about the NGO’s that forced the issue onto the table through their years of concerted advocacy? I’m sure they would appreciate some clean funding percentage arriving as a result of their efforts.
January 26th, 2007 at 7:06 am
but offsetting your carbon is a very good thing. A post above reminded me of someone who, on seeing a “green” building that used 30% less energy than a conventional one–four years ago that was quite a feat. His only response was “30%? Don’t you see that’s still 70% too much?”
He was 100% correct. And 100% missing the point. If 30% is all you can manage, than you’re a fool for not doing it.
My point is: if offsetting is the best you can do, then it doesn’t make sense not to. (I’ve been offsetting for years, salving my guilty conscience by giving to conservation organizations. It was never meant to be “neutrality” and that doesn’t matter. I like doing it.)
Carbon offsetting has the significant advantage of contributing to a useful cause, wether it’s tree planting or investing in renewable technologies. That it’s not perfect parity doesn’t make it bad.
It also has, I think, significant psychological benefits. People hate being told what to do; they love feeling useful. Carbon offsetting allows them to get engaged, on a constructive basis, with the concepts of footprinting, clean technology, and sustainable development. It’s potentially a mobilizing force that’s much more powerful than the exhortations of people like Monbiot.
I believe that offsetting leads to greater involvement, not less. If you have proof that people are using it to avoid the real solutions, show me. Then proove that they wouldn’t have just found some other, less useful, rationalisation (like denial) to soothe their consciences. People will always find a rationalization for anything, if they want.
Conclusion? carbon neutrality, or off-setting is not a solution, but it’s a very good temporary measure.
January 26th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Thanks, your points complement the discussion, I esp appreciate those regarding optics. In the spirit of attempt-everything-at-once, it is important to both celebrate the 30%’s and also during the celebratory conversations or awards acceptance to then call for improvements, esp toward those immediately possible. My beef was with people who had been to Al Gore’s Boot Camp, being interviewed on Canada’s national radio, accepting the laurels, but when provided such opportunity, not then calling for their own achievements to be surpassed. Yes, certainly reduce your own carbon shoesize, but then also speak about the footprint of the vehicle (in the case of the SUV trade-in) itself, and how our individual actions accumulate to create a developed-world’s-response, being the real culprit in terms of atmospheric concentrations, including a reinforcement that we are nested within these communal systems, and the footprint’s (Western?) focus on the individual can veil us from this.
Certainly if I do 30% on my reno of my home, that is a great achievement. But say if by waiting another 2 years to spruce the place up, I could have had enough money stashed, and have sourced out the contractors who could get me to 70%. Now that the drywall is up, the cupboards are in and the paint is dry; achieving that extra 40% has been virtually foreclosed. My most obvious option is to now try to offset the 40. It’s this kind of scenario that makes me wary about offsetting’s adequacy, given that trees can both burn and rot. RE I’m all for!, but we still have to keep pulling the focus back to conservation and efficiency, and especially the total emissions contribution of the developed world, and unfortunately offsetting doesn’t do this. However, optics does help in this regard. (I was pleased to hear this topic even discussed on our national radio!)