A depressing commentary on coal…
My friend and colleague Eric Reguly, perhaps the best example of an environmental capitalist worried about his children’s future, wrote this column in the Globe and Mail about how, despite all our talk of renewables, conservation, and even nuclear, the demand and money is flowing to coal — a bad sign all around. A three-word summary of his article: we are screwed.
Hmmm… maybe we can all feel good about ourselves by applying for a new MBNA Canada credit card (MasterCard) that, instead of offering air miles on purchases, now offers carbon offset credits, “offering a simple way for consumers to reduce their environmental footprint.”
Simple, maybe… but reduce?!?! There is just something wrong about this. How can it be considered “reducing” by encouraging consumption under the illusion that we’re helping save the planet?
I have to say, these days I’m seeing less and less value in the concept of offsets, and worry that they may be making things worse, not better. To top it all off, the Ontario Power Authority is investigating how to measure and extract value from the CO2 emissions resulting from the province’s policies on renewables, conservation and perhaps even nuclear. It’s looking at carbon credits, among other options. But can we truly consider our policies and actions in Ontario green if we sell the green benefits to another jurisdiction? As others have pointed out to me, this smells of double accounting and would rob Ontarians of their green bragging rights.
Let’s hope the power authority is doing this purely as an intellectual exercise.
Okay, rant ends here…
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business 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 clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
November 17th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
I’m not surprised, because it seems like big business is virtually the only means we have of communicating with most people these days.
It’s also closely related to somethign that has been going on for some time: the idea that recycling is virtuous. Recycling is the last resort of a three-prong approach: reduce, reuse, recycle. The only one compatible with big business is the last one, and it is the only one that receives any significant attention. In the company I work for, for example, the company newsletter promotes “we recycled x amount of paper, saving y number of trees”. No mention is made of how much paper was avoided being consumed, and the only thing you can draw from such an isolated statement is that, the more you recycle, the better you are. The truth, of course, is that it’s much better to have never consumed in the first place.
So, I wonder if recycling has, on average, ultimately led us to consume more, simply because it’s “okay” to consume as long as we have an outlet to recycle the remnants. “Green” power may lead to the same: the message after it’s passed through the telephone game may be that, if it’s green, it’s infinite and renewable, and it therefore doesn’t matter how much you use. The truth, though, is that we will only be able to live entirely from green, sustainable energy sources if we drastically reduce our consumption. If we don’t, it’ll remain a feel-good “top up” to the existing energy sources (until they run out, of course).
November 22nd, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I’m not surprised either. People are approached as consumers and also always told that their only power to change things rests in that arena as well! The other day I saw some stuffed polar bears for sale, with all funds going to “help save the polar bears”. Huh? How much energy and carbon was used to make… Bla bla. You get it. Things won’t change until people realize they can’t buy their way to a new world, they actually have to create it using something other than $$$.