By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: April 29, 2007
THE rush to go on a carbon diet, even if by proxy, is in overdrive.
In addition to the celebrities — Leo, Brad, George — politicians like John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are now running, at least part of the time, carbon-neutral campaigns. A lengthening list of big businesses — international banks, London’s taxi fleet, luxury airlines — also claim “carbon neutrality.” Silverjet, a plush new trans-Atlantic carrier, bills itself as the first fully carbon-neutral airline. It puts about $28 of each round-trip ticket into a fund for global projects that, in theory, squelch as much carbon dioxide as the airline generates — about 1.2 tons per passenger, the airline says.
Also, a largely unregulated carbon-cutting business has sprung up. In this market, consultants or companies estimate a person’s or company’s output of greenhouse gases. Then, these businesses sell “offsets,” which pay for projects elsewhere that void or sop up an equal amount of emissions — say, by planting trees or, as one new company proposes, fertilizing the ocean so algae can pull the gas out of the air. Recent counts by Business Week magazine and several environmental watchdog groups tally the trade in offsets at more than $100 million a year and growing blazingly fast.
But is the carbon-neutral movement just a gimmick?
On this, environmentalists aren’t neutral, and they don’t agree. Some believe it helps build support, but others argue that these purchases don’t accomplish anything meaningful — other than giving someone a slightly better feeling (or greener reputation) after buying a 6,000-square-foot house or passing the million-mile mark in a frequent-flier program. In fact, to many environmentalists, the carbon-neutral campaign is a sign of the times — easy on the sacrifice and big on the consumerism.
As long as the use of fossil fuels keeps climbing — which is happening relentlessly around the world — the emission of greenhouse gases will keep rising. The average American, by several estimates, generates more than 20 tons of carbon dioxide or related gases a year; the average resident of the planet about 4.5 tons.
At this rate, environmentalists say, buying someone else’s squelched emissions is all but insignificant.
“The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church’s sale of indulgences back before the Reformation,” said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. “Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins.”
“This whole game is badly in need of a modern Martin Luther,” Mr. Hayes added.
Some environmental campaigners defend this marketplace as a legitimate, if imperfect, way to support an environmental ethic and political movement, even if the numbers don’t all add up.
“We can’t stop global warming with voluntary offsets, but they offer an option for individuals looking for a way to contribute to the solution in addition to reducing their own emissions and urging their elected representatives to support good policy,” said Daniel A. Lashof, the science director of the climate center at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
But he and others agree that more oversight is needed. Voluntary standards and codes of conduct are evolving in Europe and the United States to ensure that a ton of carbon dioxide purchased is actually a ton of carbon dioxide avoided.
The first attempt at an industry report card, commissioned by the environmental group Clean Air/Cool Planet (which has some involvement in the business), gave decidedly mixed reviews to the field, selecting eight sellers of carbon offsets that it concluded were reasonably reliable.
But the report, “A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon-Offset Providers,” concluded that this market was no different than any other, saying, “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
Prices vary widely for offsetting the carbon dioxide tonnage released by a long plane flight, S.U.V. commute or energy-hungry house. The report suggested that the cheapest offsets may not be legitimate.
For example, depending on where you shop for carbon credits, avoiding the ton of carbon dioxide released by driving a midsize car about 2,000 miles could cost $5 or $25, according to data in the report.
Mr. Hayes said there were legitimate companies and organizations that help people and companies measure their emissions and find ways to cut them, both directly and indirectly by purchasing certain kinds of credits. But overall, he said, an investment in such credits — given the questions about their reliability — should be looked at more as conventional charity (presuming you check to be sure the projects are real) and less as something like a license to binge on private jet travel.
In many ways, the carbon-neutral campaign mimics other efforts that use markets to save the environment. For nearly two decades, for example, forest protection groups have disputed the merits of “certified” tropical hardwood and other products that manufacturers claim are harvested in ways that don’t imperil virgin forests.
Some environmentalists say it’s better to offer some income to those who use forests in a renewable way. But others insist that instead of trying to police the trade by rooting our fraudulent planks, it’s better to avoid the timber altogether. Only one of many forest certification programs, run by the Forest Stewardship Council, has been widely endorsed by environmental groups.
Michael R. Solomon, the author of “Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having and Being” and a professor at St. Joseph’s University, said he was not surprised by the allure of the carbon-offsetting market.
“Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioral change,” he said. “We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”
But he said there was danger ahead, “if we become trained to substitute dollars for deeds — kind of an ‘I gave at the office’ prescription for the environment.”
Charles Komanoff, an energy economist in New York, said the commercial market in climate neutrality could have even more harmful effects.
It could, by suggesting there’s an easy way out, blunt public support for what will really be needed in the long run, he said: a binding limit on emissions or a tax on the fuels that generate greenhouse gases.
“There isn’t a single American household above the poverty line that couldn’t cut their CO2 at least 25 percent in six months through a straightforward series of fairly simple and terrifically cost-effective measures,” he said.
Jonathan Shopley, the chief executive of Britain’s CarbonNeutral Company, which does only 5 percent of its offsetting directly for individuals and the rest for businesses, insisted that the voluntary markets fill a vital gap.
This is particularly true, he said, because laws or treaties, like the Kyoto Protocol, that have mandatory limits on greenhouse gases have so far failed to blunt the relentless global rise in such emissions.
“That isn’t going to get us where we need to go,” Mr. Shopley said.
NYTimes:Buying Carbon-Neutral
五月 8, 2007
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: April 29, 2007
GOOGLE the term “carbon neutral” and any number of businesses pop up, offering, for a fee, to offset carbon emissions. It can be hard to tell which businesses are legitimate, and the nonprofit group Clean Air/Cool Planet concluded in a recent study that consumers need to carefully check just what they’re buying.
Its report, “A Consumers’ Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers,” is available online at www.cleanair-coolplanet.org. The group notes that it has been involved with one provider of offsets.
The report and independent experts list vital questions that should be asked before buying:
Can the seller show that the offset — for a methane-capturing well or windmill or tree plantation or the like — would not have happened anyway (a characteristic called “additionality” in the industry)?
Is there a way for the provider to show that the difference in emissions benefits because of the extra infusion of cash provided by selling offsets?
There’s what might be called the Brooklyn Bridge effect: Can the business prove that purchased credits are unique and not being sold and resold?
How long does it take for the emissions benefits to accrue, and is there any guarantee of permanence? (These issues have been a particular challenge with the oldest type of offsetting projects — planting trees. Although purveyors of such credits contend that such projects often come with secondary benefits, like reforesting the banks of salmon streams, tree planting is among the most dubious of options. Trees can die or burn, liberating stashed carbon as carbon dioxide once again — which has happened in some such projects.)
The best and most expensive credits, experts say, tend to be those that come through buying and retiring someone’s allowance to pollute, like the credits traded under certain provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, the first climate treaty requiring participating countries to curb emissions.
A big limitation on the availability of such offsets is that the United States, while a signatory, never ratified the Kyoto accord and has no concrete credits for businesses, and consumers, to trade.
The guide to carbon-cutting options listed eight companies out of several dozen that it deemed reasonably reliable. One such company is Atmosfair, a German offsetting company that deals in credits created by building sun-heated rice-cooking kitchens in India and power plants burning methane from wastewater in Thailand.
Another is NativeEnergy, based in Vermont, which invests money in projects like windmills and gas-capturing systems on Indian reservations and small farms.
One company on the report’s list of reasonable performers, the CarbonNeutral Company in Britain, received a much harsher review in “The Carbon Neutral Myth,” a report published recently by the Transnational Institute, an international network of campaigners on globalization and other international issues.
Executives at the carbon-trading company said its differences with that group, which favors strict regulatory approaches to global warming, were mainly philosophical.
For additional coverage and commentary on “carbon neutrality,” see also:
A blog by Joel Makower on green commerce.
http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2007/01/is_carbon_neutr.html
Real Climate, a blog on climate maintained by a network of climate scientists.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/buying-a-stairway-to-heaven/
A blog by Terrapass, one provider of carbon offsets.
http://www.terrapass.com/terrablog/
A roundup of coverage and commentary on carbon commerce from the Columbia Journalism Review:
http://www.cjrdaily.org/behind_the_news/emissions_markets_the_good_the.php
A blog on the need for a carbon tax from Charles Komanoff.
http://www.carbontax.org/blog/
The Tufts Climate Initiative on voluntary carbon offsets:
http://www.tufts.edu/tie/tci/carbonoffsets/
By JIM ROBBINS
Published: May 8, 2007
LAPWAI, Idaho — On the Nez Perce reservation here, land that was cleared in the 19th century for farming is being converted back to forest, in part to sell the trees’ ability to sequester carbon.
“These forests are a carbon crop,” Brian Kummett, a forester for the Nez Perce tribal forestry division, said as he surveyed a vast field studded with recently planted ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and larch saplings. “We can sell the rights from the time the forest is planted to the time it’s harvested, 80 or 120 years down the road.”
The market for carbon credits promises to be a boon for some land-rich but cash-poor tribes. Selling carbon sequestration credits early in the growth of a forest lets the tribe realize some money more quickly, rather than waiting for decades for the harvest.
Carbon is a constituent of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. Trees can pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon in their tissue. Companies may be able to offset the carbon dioxide they send into the atmosphere by paying for projects that pull carbon out of the atmosphere.
The Nez Perce are participating in an Indian tribe “carbon portfolio” being created by the National Carbon Offset Coalition in Butte, Mont., an organization supported largely by the Energy Department.
“They have a long-term management, large acreage and trained staff,” said Ted Dodge, executive director of the coalition.
Bob Gruenig, senior policy analyst for the National Tribal Environmental Council in Albuquerque, said the tribes “see climate change as a really big issue.”
“They are seeing changes in the land, changes in plants and changes in the migration of wildlife,” he said.
New forests are just part of the carbon credits that are being sold on reservations and at other places. In the last few weeks, the Chicago Carbon Exchange has approved selling carbon sequestration credits on rangeland and no-till agricultural fields.
An acre of pine forest captures and holds one to two metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which it uses for photosynthesis. Untilled cropland holds a third of a ton of carbon per acre, and rangeland holds up to a fifth of a ton. The sequestered carbon dioxide is measured by soil tests before and after the planting.
The market for carbon sequestration in the United States is voluntary. As a result, the demand has been low compared with Europe, where emissions are now restricted by law. The market also lacks uniform standards, prompting some environmental campaigners to question its credibility. Tribal carbon sales have had mixed results since the first such sale in the 1990s, when the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington sold rights to its land for 25 cents a metric ton.
The Nez Perce had a major deal fall through a few years ago. It would have paid the tribe $1.50 a ton for 200,000 tons over 50 years and would have been worth nearly $500,000. Experts estimate that a project of that size would offset carbon equivalent to a year’s emission from 500,000 cars.
Other tribes have found reason to grow carbon crops. In Washington and Oregon, new coal-fired power plants are required to offset their emissions. So the Lummi in northwestern Washington bought 1,700 acres that had been logged, reforested the land and sold sequestration rights to a power company.
Officials say studies showing that recent warming is almost certainly caused by accumulating greenhouse gases are increasing support for “cap and trade” rules that limit the carbon dioxide a site can emit. If a factory produces less than the cap, it can sell the surplus rights to emit carbon to other companies. If a plant exceeds the limit, it has to buy the right to emit more gases from another company or find other methods to sequester carbon equal to what it is releasing.
Carbon dioxide credits now sell for about $4 a metric ton. Mandatory restrictions, experts say, could increase the price to $12 or higher. In Europe, the cost of a credit sold for sequestering carbon dioxide has reached $20, and even $30, a ton.
“We need $12 to $15 carbon to really make this work,” Mr. Dodge said. “We’re doing it on small margins. But to bring in a lot more landowners, you need better prices.”
Even so, “Things are changing,” said Sean Clark, director of offset programs for the Climate Trust, a group in Portland, Ore., that buys and sells carbon credits. “The last 12 months have been growing exponentially.”
The Nez Perce tribe has 4,000 acres that it has planted with trees in 29 projects across the 75,000-acre reservation. The tribe had hoped to sell its carbon-fixing rights to European companies. But because the United States has not signed the Kyoto Protocol, it cannot, even though it is considered a sovereign nation.
The sale of carbon sequestration rights has enhanced land conservation. Plants on rangeland where carbon rights have been sold, for example, have to be kept healthy to assure that they hold carbon. That means that they have to be grazed by a specific number of cows in a certain way. Forests have to be managed sustainably.
In most cases, third parties inspect and verify terms of the sale.
Carbon purchasers do not rely on one type of carbon sequestration, but a portfolio of different types sold by aggregators like the Offset Coalition or the Climate Trust. A company does not buy just one forested area, for example, but several, along with, perhaps, rangeland and cropland. In addition to biological sequestration, they might pay to capture methane at landfills, switch from diesel to other less polluting emissions or pay for energy efficient light bulbs.
“It’s like a mutual fund,” Mr. Kummett said. “You spread out your risk.”
Because the market for carbon fixing is being sorted out, “uncertainty is the name of the game,” Mr. Clark said.
Many rules depend on how well the contracts are written and what the plans are for problems. “If a beetle infestation hits your forest stand and all the tree are killed, all of the carbon gets re-emitted,” Mr. Clark said. “Then what?”
Something like that happened to the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Tribes in Montana. In 2001, they sold the sequestration rights to 250 acres to a company in London. The trees died from drought and had to be replanted.
Part of what gives tribal sequestration rights their value is low “permanence risk.” Commonly held by a tribal government, the land will not be sold, and long-term leases are more secure.
One day geological sequestration — pumping captured and liquefied carbon dioxide into the ground — will probably replace biological sequestration. But at this point, biology is the only affordable alternative.
“Biological sequestration credits are a bridge,” Mr. Dodge said. “We can bring them to the table now, but technology may pass us by.”
