The thing about carbon offsets

A.C. Thompson and Duane Moles have written an article you all should read if you want to better understand the serious limitations to the carbon offset phenomenon. Here are two essential paragraphs:

On a practical level, while the money raised by offsets can be useful, new doubts are emerging about the industry's basic accounting. A December 2006 survey of the offset business, compiled by a team of specialists in the field, criticized the majority of the companies hawking the product. "There are no widely accepted standards...as to what qualifies as an 'offset' for purposes of making consumers carbon neutral," notes the report, titled A Consumer's Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers. "Almost anyone can offer to sell you almost anything and claim that this purchase will make you carbon neutral." Commissioned by Clean Air-Cool Planet, the study looked at thirty firms and gave the majority of them poor marks....

Consider a typical scenario: Someone with a little extra income wants to offset the emission of her car, say a late 1990s Volkswagen Jetta she drives roughly 15,000 miles a year. The first step is to visit the website of an offsetter to see how much CO2 the vehicle is belching and how much it will cost to defray the damage. According to the TerraPass site, that car spews out 5.22 metric tons of carbon particles annually. Bonneville, on the other hand, puts the figure at 5.55 tons, while a third firm, DrivingGreen, says the Jetta emits just 2.99 tons. Each site allows users to input different data, thus producing the dramatically different results.

But to my thinking, this isn't the main problem with carbon offsets. It seems to me that carbon offsets have a couple of structural problems that will severely limit their ability to accomplish anything significant.

Let's, for a moment and for simplicity's sake, pretend that the world is divided between rich, expensive parts and poor cheap ones. Let's also pretend that there are no accounting problems with carbon offsets. In this approximate world, good samaritans with guilty consciences in the rich world can then pay relatively cheap prices to basically erase all of their greenhouse gas emissions. The money they pay will fund things like new, green power facilities and tree farms, and giant solar panel arrays in the poor world. Rich output stays largely the same, poor output takes a nosedive and the net carbon released into the atmosphere is zero. Voila. But as the number of obvious, cheap places to institute green changes in the poor world diminihes, the value of every offset dollar spent diminishes too. The devaluation will in theory continue until the offsets can only be cashed in at equally great expense in the rich world and the poor world. Basically, the price of offseting one unit of carbon will rise over time and people will buy less offsets altogether. My guess is that the growth of the carbon-offset market will level off laughably beneath the level needed to "solve" the carbon crisis.

Obviously this is the cartoon version of things, but I think it represents a pretty fair analysis.

On the other hand, let's pretend there was a rich person or government who wanted to offset everybody's outputs all at once, or over a very short period of time. Could that happen? Could Bill Gates obviate the need for some sort of Apollo-type mission to save the world from becoming cooked? I don't actually know, but I would be surprised if there were enough resources on the planet to cancel out all of the carbon we humans emit on a day-to-day basis in 2007. Carbon offsets require a lag time in at least two ways. First, offset-money funds nascent projects that take time to mature to their full offset potential (windmill farms need first to be erected and then to fully replace competing greenhouse power sources, etc., etc.), and, second, enough carbon sinks need to be planted to swallow a sufficient percentage of transportation-related emissions that, in the non-CAFE world of 2007, don't go away even if we switch our entire grid over to geo-green power.

This is not to say that people who can afford offsets shouldn't buy them. They should. But they should do so only in parallel with other efforts to take the sorts of national and international steps that will be needed to lower emissions and keep global temperatures acceptably low. If the offset market proves to be just an avenue that concerned rich people follow to exorcise their guilt about their contributions to global warming, or if the very wealthy buy carbon offsets in lieu of other, stronger efforts to bring about major changes, then the whole enterprise may be doing more harm than good.