Carbon offsetting.
The Great Green Rip-off?
It's travel's biggest bargain - pay someone to plant a couple of trees and you can keep flying with a clear conscience. But where exactly does the money go, and will it really save the planet?
By Tom Robbins
· The Observer,
· Sunday December 10 2006
Carbon conscience ... do planting schemes really offset the evils of flying?
It’s so easy. You buy your bargain flights for £20 and set off for your city break in Spain. Global warming? Not a problem – just click on the web and pay a couple of quid to cancel out the evil effects of the flight. Trees will be planted, or energy saving lightbulbs installed somewhere in a far off land. Your guilt is assuaged. You can have your cake and eat it.
The industry that enabled this little magic trick – the ‘carbon off set’ – is booming, with Britain the world capital. There are now at least 15 companies in this country catering to people who volunteer to off set the carbon emissions of flights; the rest of the world manages just 29. A year ago, 20 people per week were offsetting flights through the website of one British firm, the CarbonNeutral Company. Today, it’s 200 per week.
Celebrities, big corporations and in particular travel companies have been rushing to sign up for offset schemes and to bathe in the righteous glow of eco-responsibility, and the column inches that follow . In the last fortnight alone, Lastminute and Silverjet have announced new schemes. And while previously airlines and tour companies asked for a donation after you made your booking, some are pushing it even harder. Tomorrow, Crystal will announce it will start automatically adding a offsetting fee, which remains optional but which you must opt out of. Silverjet, the all business class airline, goes further still, with a mandatory charge that everyone must pay. So come on: keep travelling, but cough up and save the world too!
Except, as your mouse hovers over the ‘donate’ button, you might like to know that one particular industry has decided against signing up with any of the existing offsetting companies. In fact, its experts have judged that the firms keep back too much of the donations; that their calculations as to how much each flight should cost vary wildly, leaving travellers confused; and that they lack clear, accountable structures. And who is this rocking the boat? Some crazy ultra-greens hellbent on destroying our minibreaks? Er, no. It is the travel industry itself.
Read the full article……
Britain’s big three travel trade bodies have decided they need to set up a
new off setting system to tackle climate change. Setting aside their rivalry, the Association of Independent Tour Operators (Aito), The Association of British Travel Agents (Abta) and the Federation of Tour Operators (FTO) are working on the launch of Ticos (the Tourism Industry Carbon Offset Service). ‘We didn’t want to use one of the existing offset companies that take 40 per cent of the fee for themselves,’ said Noel Josephides, an Aito council member. ‘The projects out there just weren’t suitable.’
As Dick Sisman, Aito’s responsible travel consultant and the architect of the new scheme, told 150 bosses of Britain’s leading independent travel firms from the stage of its annual conference in Granada last month: ‘I wouldn’t even touch most of the offset schemes out there.’
At the start, about a decade ago, off setting seemed so simple. Every schoolboy knew that trees and plants breathe in carbon dioxide, and out oxygen. So if your flight is responsible for emitting, say, a tonne of carbon dioxide, you must plant trees to suck a tonne back.
Soon, everyone was getting into tree planting. The Rolling Stones embarked on a ‘carbon neutral’ tour in 2003, planting one tree per 60 punters. Dido, Leonardo DiCaprio, even the celebrity drinking club, the Groucho, started stumping up for saplings. In 2002, Coldplay announced it would be off setting the environmental impact caused by the release of its second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, by planting 10,000 mango trees in southern India.
Fans could help by investing £17.50, and would receive a certificate acknowledging their contribution to the ‘Coldplay forest’. Newspapers got involved too. That same year the Sunday Times started a campaign to get its readers to plant 100,000 trees, fronted by artist Damien Hirst who made a giant sculpture of gas canisters showing the scale of the carbon emissions for which each individual was responsible.
Then came the voices of dissent. Environmentalists complained that in some places local people were being thrown off the land to make way for new forests, which were sometimes non-native trees in monoculture plantations and hence disastrous for local ecology. Worse, scientists pointed out that trees locked up carbon only while they were alive. As soon as they died, and were burnt or rotted, the carbon would be released again, at a time when levels in the atmosphere are even more critical than today. Overall, they argued, it was the trees, not the albums, conferences or tours that were carbon neutral.
As if to underline the point, this year journalists discovered that the Coldplay forest in India was not exactly blooming: 40 per cent of the trees had died, with villagers saying they had been given no funds for irrigation or fertiliser (although other forestry projects paid for by Coldplay elsewhere may have done better).
And now it seems the tipping point has been reached: earlier this year the WWF, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace issued a joint statement saying they do not support forestry projects to off set carbon emissions.
This must have come as rather bad news to all the hundreds of thousands of Britons who have already stumped up for trees to off set their carbon emissions. Particularly, you suspect, the individual who paid for 12,000 trees to be planted, at £7 a time, through the Sunday Times campaign. The CarbonNeutral Company, the firm responsible for that campaign and for most of the celebrity planting schemes, now accepts that trees aren’t the best way of tackling climate change, but argues they were a useful way to get customers interested in the early days.
‘We have never promoted a position that we could plant our way out of climate change,’ said Sue Welland, cofounder of the CarbonNeutral Company (which abandoned its unequivocal former name, ‘Future Forests’, last year). ‘We have always used trees as a way of engaging people in the debate. Now everybody has got much more sophisticated, and understands
the idea of technology off sets, so we are moving people out of forestry into technology, which is a faster way to tackle the issue of climate change.’
Instead of planting trees to suck up your carbon, with ‘technology offsets’ you pay to fund projects, which stop other people emitting carbon dioxide. This might be paying towards a small hydro-electric power station in Bulgaria; for energy-efficient lightbulbs to be installed in Kazakhstan; or for stoves which burn less wood to be provided for Mexican tortilla sellers.
Last year 75 per cent of the Carbon Neutral Company’s investment went
to technology, with 25 per cent in forestry, but it expects this to become 90-95 per cent by next year. Climate Care, another leading provider, say it ‘accepts that it is best practice to prevent carbon emissions in the first place rather than to absorb them through forestry’, but that it keeps one rainforest restoration project in Uganda, representing about 20 per cent of its spending, because it is such a worthwhile scheme. The new Ticos scheme, overseen by Sisman, Dr Hugh Somerville, former head of sustainable business development at British Airways, and John Swarbrooke of Sheffield Hallam University, focuses solely on funding renewable energy schemes, such as funding a project to make solar panels in Africa.
Even this move to technology isn’t good enough for many environmentalists, who take a hardline view that, as soon as you fly, the damage has been done, and no scheme can undo that. On a moral level too, they argue, you shouldn’t be doing the damage then asking someone else to clean up for you. This, they argue, amounts to a sort of ‘carbon colonialism’. Or, as the oft-quoted bon mot of the dark greens goes: ‘It’s like giving money to the RSPCA so you can keep kicking your dog.’
The consensus though, seems to be that doing some good in a developing country, particularly by helping to seed the growth in alternative energy, is better than doing nothing. Even if it does take the summer holiday into the rather surreal territory of influencing another country’s energy policy.
‘Investment in trying to improve the energy economies in developing countries is a fantastic thing, and we’ve been campaigning for it for 20 years,’ said Charlie Kronick, head of the climate and energy campaign at Greenpeace. ‘But we don’t think it should be dependent on the goodwill of tourists going on holiday.’
However, the travel industry’s decision not to simply sign up to today’s off setting companies had nothing to do with such theoretical arguments. ‘The existing off set providers are doing the best they can, but to me it’s a bit like Conference level football,’ says Sisman. ‘We’re trying to move the whole thing to a new level, the Premiership, particularly when it comes to transparency.’
With worthy projects such as buying stoves for the poor of Honduras, or lightbulbs for Indians, perhaps it’s not surprising that many travellers assume that the organisations to which they are handing their off setting money are charities. In fact almost half are not charities but profit-making companies.
More importantly, travellers volunteering their money probably expect all of it to fund off setting. In reality, of £10 given to the CarbonNeutral company (Britain’s leading voluntary off setter), £1.48 goes to the government in VAT, £3.41 goes to running costs and salaries, leaving just £5.11 to go directly towards off setting projects. While some travellers who have already paid up might be choking on their cornflakes at this point, it’s worth noting that CarbonNeutral is up there with the best on this. Climate Care, whose services are used by our sister paper the Guardian, manages to pass about 60 per cent of payments through to off set projects (although it does not pay VAT). One off set company passes on just 40 per cent of payments, according to new research by Lund University.
It was only when Ticos announced its own plans that these figures started to Carbonraise eyebrows – it believes it can pass at least 80 per cent of payments direct to the off setting projects.
And yet it would be wrong to imply that these companies are getting fat on champagne lunches funded by earnest off setters. While it is a for-profit firm, the CarbonNeutral Company actually made a small loss last year and points out that included in its ‘overheads’ are the unavoidable costs of seeking out suitable projects, and auditing them, plus various education projects in the UK.
‘We are not in this to make money, but because we passionately believe in it,’ said Michael Buick, communications manager for Climate Care. ‘We do strive to have that percentage going to projects as high as possible, although for new and fast growing businesses you have to put in a lot of investment up front.’
Another key issue is the confusion over how the existing companies work out the price they charge for off setting flights. As private firms they are free to do their calculations however they want, and the result is that off setting the same flight with one firm can work out wildly different to the next.
Climate Care says that a flight from London Heathrow to Sydney and back generates 5.61 tonnes of carbon dioxide, which will cost £42.11. The CarbonNeutral Company calculates it at 3.7 tonnes, which you can off set by planting trees for £27.38. A third company, Grow a Forest, agrees with 3.7 tonnes, but asks £46.15 for its trees to off set it. Such variations do little to inspire public trust.
Sisman’s greatest objection is that though there’s no suggestion that the existing offsetters are anything other than scrupulously honest and well meaning, the system itself lacks clarity. ‘If the same company is collecting the money, and spending it, it can decide exactly how much it wants to keep,’ he says. ‘The public often has no idea where its money is actually going.’
It’s another misapprehension that the off setting companies plant trees or carry out the projects themselves; they merely pay other companies and agencies to do so. The UK off set company is in practice buying the ‘carbon credits’ from the people abroad who carry out the projects, and then reselling, at a mark-up, to the British traveller. The same is true with some big industrial companies, which, in countries that have signed up to the Kyoto Protocol, are forced to buy mandatory carbon credits to off set their emissions above an agreed limit (aviation and travel are currently exempt). Except that while the mandatory credits are controlled and regulated, the voluntary sector (including off setting flights) is unregulated, so suspicions abound as to exactly what trees are really being planted, and what new projects carried out.
Coldplay’s forest is a case in point. The band paid the CarbonNeutral Company, which paid an Indian company, which paid village farmers. When journalists began looking for trees, each blamed the other (although CarbonNeutral says if one project fails, it makes good the shortfall with others). The offsetting companies insist – and there is every reason to believe them – that they make huge efforts to validate the schemes, setting up their own systems of standards, employing auditors, making visits to check on the project companies. ‘Their motivations are sound, but they’re making up the standards themselves,’ says Greenpeace’s Kronick. ‘There is no external adjudicator and when a company tells you it’s meeting its standards, it’s like “they would say that”.’