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Carbon offsets
Does anyone know of a carbon offset scheme that allows you to spend your money on carbon credits?
There's lots of schemes out there, but they seem to fall into:
1. Planting trees. (This is good in some ways, but the trees will take 50 years or more to grow to a size where they soak up enough carbon to offset all that you want them to offset - and in 50 years, the damage will already have been done)
2. Funding renewable energy schemes. (This is also partly good, but it's a myth that renewable energy is carbon-neutral. Just building the wind turbine/whatever will generate a fair bit of CO2 and if the turbine is built on a bog, then, in some areas at least, the release of methane from the ground disturbance may wipe out all the gains of the saving in fossil fuels) And renewable energy sources are often in remote areas which means that transmission losses have to be taken into account.
3. Funding energy reduction schemes by giving away low-energy light bulbs and the like. (This is potentially flawed. If you give a low-energy lightbulb to someone who isn't seriously trying to keep their CO2 down, then they simply leave it on for longer and we end up where we started)
Carbon credits - the pieces of paper that allow industry to emit CO2 - are the only items that you can actually, hand-on-heart, say have saved the amount of CO2 that you emitted. And I can't (on a quick search) find a scheme that promises to do that with your cash. And that rather suggests to me that many carbon offset schemes may not really be doing what they promise.
There's lots of schemes out there, but they seem to fall into:
1. Planting trees. (This is good in some ways, but the trees will take 50 years or more to grow to a size where they soak up enough carbon to offset all that you want them to offset - and in 50 years, the damage will already have been done)
2. Funding renewable energy schemes. (This is also partly good, but it's a myth that renewable energy is carbon-neutral. Just building the wind turbine/whatever will generate a fair bit of CO2 and if the turbine is built on a bog, then, in some areas at least, the release of methane from the ground disturbance may wipe out all the gains of the saving in fossil fuels) And renewable energy sources are often in remote areas which means that transmission losses have to be taken into account.
3. Funding energy reduction schemes by giving away low-energy light bulbs and the like. (This is potentially flawed. If you give a low-energy lightbulb to someone who isn't seriously trying to keep their CO2 down, then they simply leave it on for longer and we end up where we started)
Carbon credits - the pieces of paper that allow industry to emit CO2 - are the only items that you can actually, hand-on-heart, say have saved the amount of CO2 that you emitted. And I can't (on a quick search) find a scheme that promises to do that with your cash. And that rather suggests to me that many carbon offset schemes may not really be doing what they promise.
Re: No
Developing countries are going to want to reach the level of developed countries. If we can adopt a lower level of CO2 emission, then they will aim for that level rather than our current level. TEchnology transfer will be important.