Real action on climate change
Login
Not a member? Sign up
Christmas gift
The gift of a less polluted planet - now available from Sandbag!
Sandbag's YouTube video
Carbon trading explained through biscuits.
See It!
Check out our map of Britain's biggest carbon emitters.
Who's new
- karl
- Mylne.Karimov
- monaghan
- Dave Purdon
- mosmankhan
off-setting
Why offsetting can be upsetting
I met a great journalist last week who has been trying to get under the skin of the offsetting industry, including by visiting some of the projects people are investing in to create the emissions 'reductions' that people are buying to compensate for their own 'unavoidable'* emissions.
I can completely see why the offsetting industry has sprung up and why it is growing at such a fast pace. As awareness of climate change rises it is natural to want to be able to do something about it. But offsetting is fraught with moral hazard. The guys who set up www.cheatneutral.com have brilliantly highlighted one of the problems - does paying someone not to do something bad, so you can continue, really help things? ...continues
Offsetting is confusing
According to Reuters Which Money? have just compared 13 UK-based carbon offset companies and found that emissions for a test home varied from 1.15 tonnes with Carbon Footprint to 7.1 tonnes with the Carbon Neutral Company.
The government calculator, which we developed to try to help with precisely this problem, by establishing common methodologies, gave an emissions figure of 4.31 tonnes.
From the Blog
Carbon budgets in the UK
Yesterday the Committee on Climate Change published its recommendations for how the government should implement the requirements of the Climate Change Bill to introduce legally binding carbon budgets for the next 15 years.
I have to declare an interest in this subject – when I worked at Friends of the Earth we wrote the first report calling for carbon budgets to be introduced, as long ago as March 2005. Then while working in Government I was lucky enough to be involved in writing the concept into the Draft Climate Change Bill which has just been finalised and become an Act.
The UK needs its own legislation because there is insufficient clarity at an international level about what it is each country is required to do to combat climate change – the Kyoto Protocol currently runs out in 2012 and the EU’s policy package has still to be agreed and is anyway contingent on a new global deal being reached. So in this policy vacuum the UK has been merrily drifting along – doing some bits and pieces to try to incentivise and disincentivise various things - but failing overall to deliver a sustained reduction in emissions across the economy as a whole. The Climate Change Act was designed to create both the impetus and the tools for the UK to act, decisively and unilaterally, in pursuit of a low carbon economy.
Continues....