Value and Veracity

A guest post from David Turnbull

I’ve recently placed myself in a tough situation. Having moved to the East Coast, home is now quite far away as I become increasingly more concerned about my carbon footprint. While in Princeton, I take segmented showers to reduce my hot water use, I don’t eat meat, and my bike is my first option for transportation. But now that it’s summer I’m going to fly home to visit my friends and family and one could argue that this flight negates the efforts I make during the year. So I decided to look into carbon offsets, and while I didn’t put too much effort into it, I thought I’d share some information and ideas and maybe get some of yours in return.

The principle of a carbon offset is that, though you’re concerned about your own personal contribution to global climate change, you still might engage in some high-impact activities in the process of balancing quality of life with environmental concerns. So since you’re going to be emitting carbon dioxide by driving or flying or whatnot, you can pay some amount of money to support an initiative that reduces carbon dioxide emissions from some other process. For example, you might support a forestry project in which your money goes to reforest an area and ensure that it will remain unharvested in the future, thereby sequestering CO2 in the biomass of the forest. What you’re looking for in choosing a project is additionality, which means the project wouldn’t happen without the support of donors such as yourself. This requires some amount of thoughtfulness on your part and expertise that few people have. For example, I was looking at descriptions of many different projects that Carbon Fund supports, and I was surprised to see landfill gas projects on their list. I did a research project on the climate impact, efficiency, and costs for the various routes of biomass to energy. So I know that many landfills already collect the methane that is produced by the decomposition of biomass in the landfill, not because of any sense of altruism and not because environmentalists are paying them to do so but because it is profitable. So in that case there is no additionality because the project would have happened anyway. Therefore, I recommend trusting to independent third parties that have studied the types of offset projects as well as the organizations objectively. Here is one that I thought presented good information in a succinct manner: http://www.tufts.edu/tie/tci/carbonoffsets/TCI-offset-handout.htm , and their review of various organizations is here: http://www.tufts.edu/tie/tci/carbonoffsets/ratings.htm#yesbut . You can also choose projects that are implemented in the developing world and serve to enhance quality of life in local areas by providing, for example, renewable energy or even jobs.

So I went with Atmosfair because it was highly recommended by the website I just provided. Some of the names of their projects are “India: Solar Energy Substitutes Diesel Fuel,” “Thailand: Cleaning Sewage Water Protects Climate,” and “Nigeria: Efficient Fuel Wood Stoves.” Air travel has an extremely detrimental impact on the environment, worse than any ground transportation. The emissions from my roundtrip flight from Newark to SF was calculated to be over two tons of CO2 (and note that this is the amount attributed to each and every passenger on the plane). Since atmosfair is relatively expensive as far as carbon offsets go, I paid about $80 to offset my flight, but had I gone with carbonfund.org it would have cost just over $10. So why is one so much more expensive than the other? I believe the U.S. companies know that Americans aren’t willing to sacrifice much and so they’d rather that you donate $10 and feel like you’re offsetting your entire flight, even though you’re probably not. Both Atmosfair and Carbon Fund are nonprofits, so I just think Atmosfair is more realistic. I admit that I cringed when I saw how much more expensive Atmosfair was, but I’d rather not lie to myself, and even if I only had $10 to donate, it would be better to offset a portion of my flight using a highly reputable organization whose projects I like.

Also, I think it’s better to pay $80 because, well, it’s supposed to hurt a little bit. Paying $10 to ease your conscience about destroying the environment gives me some qualms. The first line of defense when it comes to environmentalism is to change your habits and minimize your own impact. If everybody decided to just maintain a destructive lifestyle and pay a couple hundred dollars every year to call themselves carbon neutral, there wouldn’t be enough offsets to go around and we wouldn’t be really solving the problem. So I wanted to put these ideas out there because I thought maybe some of you might be interested in carbon offsets for the same reasons I was, but understand that I don’t recommend them without some reservations.