Carbon Offsetting - A lot of hot air?

There is growing concern that public desire to offset carbon emissions is being exploited by companies who are taking money but not actually living up to their pledges. In some cases rainforest has been sold by people who do not own it, and in other cases investment in wind farms or tree planting is being “double counted” with the same investment sold many times over. The carbon-offset market is worth £60 million worldwide, up from £20 million in 2005.

Francis Sullivan, an expert who helped HSBC in attempts to neutralise its emissions, comments:

"There will be individuals and companies out there who think they are doing the right thing but they’re not. I am sure that people are buying offsets in this unregulated market that are not credible. I am sure there are people buying nothing more than hot air…There are sharks out there who are literally just trying to get money off you. People were offering to sell us large chunks of rainforest in Papua New Guinea. I don’t think it was theirs to sell.”

To provide a true saving, the project must demonstrate it would not have happened without the investment raised by selling carbon credit, a process referred to as additionality.  Tree planting or a windfarm project claiming to save up to 30,000 tonnes of carbon could sell an equivalent number of carbon credits for about £3 each, but the market is unregulated, and there are suspicions that the same tonne of carbon is being double counted.

Mark Kenber of “The  Climate Group” comments:

"There are plenty of projects out there that are rigorous and have no problems at all. Then there are plenty that are not truly additional and you could question the baseline used. Then there are suspicions that people have sold the same tonne of carbon to four or five different customers.”

Prominent names in the carbon offsetting business include Barclays bank, HSBC, The Brit Awards, ITV, British Gas, Coldplay, Avis, Volvo, the Conservative Party, Honda and Dido.

There are thousands of schemes across the world which aim to cut carbon emissions through tree-planting or renewable energy projects. The notional carbon credits from such schemes are sold on and there is big money to be made. For example HSBC recently paid nearly half a million pounds to offset just three months of emissions. Similarly this year's World Cup declared itself carbon neutral, as have the makers of Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" and a Middlesex school.

Some critics are now saying that carbon offsetting is a dangerous palliative that distracts from the true need to reduce consumption. Kevin Anderson, a scientist with Tyndall Centre for Climate Change comments:

"Offsetting is a dangerous delaying technique because it helps us avoid tackling the task. It helps us sleep well at night when we shouldn't sleep well at night. If we had gone to the limit of what we can do in our own lives then I could see it would be a route to go down, but we've not even started to make changes to our behaviour. I'm sure the people attending the G8 Summit didn't need a separate limo and Merc each to pick them up. but to then claim that the problem is dealt with by planting a couple of trees or whatever is worrying."

As interest and concern about carbon offsetting grows, there is an urgent need for regulation so that offsetting is genuine and the public is not exploited.