Schwarzenegger sees REDD
There’s an editorial in the LA Times called “Schwarzenegger and global warming” which is mostly a fluff piece about Arnie’s green-hero status being eclipsed by President Obama, but down the bottom, the author says,
Indonesiawill[sic] announce at the governors’ summit that it wishes to join California’s carbon-trading program. That could mean polluters in California would be granted permission to emit greenhouse gases here in exchange for buying “offsets” in Indonesia that compensate for the damage — for example, a California refinery might buy a chunk of rain forest in Indonesia to act as a carbon sink. Schwarzenegger seems to favor such offsets, but they would undercut the effectiveness of the program. It’s extremely hard to verify whether offsets reduce carbon as much as the amounts claimed, and they discourage innovation because they use existing technology to clean the air somewhere else rather than encouraging new technology to clean it here.
The author is entirely wrong here. For a start the various carbon credit schemes, most significantly the Voluntary Carbon Standard, are extremely detailed, and extremely conservative in their measurements of saved carbon, so to say that “It’s extremely hard to verify whether offsets reduce carbon as much as the amounts claimed,” is simply wrong and he offers no support for this claim at all. Yes there have been some cases where projects failed, or where the numbers were not entirely right, but those projects are the extreme minority.
The author displays an ignorance of the entire basis of carbon offsetting. In the case he describes, Californian polluters could clean up their emissions by buying so called REDD credits, a form of voluntary carbon credit that is issued per tonne of CO2e locked up in existing tropical rainforests. It’s worth pointing out that rainforest destruction accounts for some 19% of the world’s GHG emissions. REDD stands for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation and is a rapidly emerging sector for many developing countries whose forests have been under threat for some time. REDD is a way of valuing the forests in place rather than forcing them to only have a value when they have been pulped. REDD benefits flow down to indigenous forest peoples, creating wealth, offering societal independence and helping maintain traditional practices.
A typical logging camp in somewhere like Indonesia or PNG is often little more than a slave pit. Locals are press-ganged into labour that pays them around the same as the fees they must then pay for lodging and food. Disease, sexual exploitation and all manner of predatory behaviours follow these camps about as they chew through the greatest stores of bio-diversity and carbon on Earth, lining the pockets of an elite few.
No amount of carbon tax or direct energy efficiency programme in California will do anything to slow the destruction of the world’s forests, and this the power of carbon credit systems.
Some people who don’t completely understand how carbon trading works tend to regard carbon offsetting, ie paying someone else to reduce emissions on your behalf, as somehow inferior to making emissions reduction yourself. “You have to reduce, then offset,” they say. Alas this idea masks a very child-like view of the world. Offsetting, especially with credits generated under programmes designed to include bio-diversity and social outcomes, can often be much more effective as addressing global climate change than saving on power back home. The atmosphere is global and GHGs can stay in the air for 100 years or more, where they really do mix it up globally. So emissions saved or removed in one part of the world are absolutely equivalent to emissions released near ground level in another part of the world. (Note I say near ground level here because emissions released at altitude have a higher ‘radiative forcing index’ and thus a greater global warming potential. See a discussion of this at flights.carbonplanet.com.)
In-house emission reductions though energy saving or whatever will ultimately save you money, both in terms of the power saved and also in terms of the emissions you then don’t need to pay for. But they don’t offer broader social benefits like some forms of carbon credits can do. For a company wishing to genuinely operate with no carbon footprint at all must, in part, offset. Best that it offsets in a way that creates collateral benefits. This is the power of REDD. — DS
