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MONTREAL – I just booked a trip to Arizona in February to attend an old friend’s birthday celebrations. Can’t wait. But as an environment reporter, I’m reading and writing about climate change all the time. So every time I book a flight, I cringe, knowing that greenhouse gases emitted from airplanes are contributing significantly to a dangerous warming of the planet. About 2 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions are from air travel now, and experts predict that if current trends continue, by 2050 air travel will represent 5 per cent of all carbon emissions related to human activities.
So, to make up for the emissions my flight will cause, I’m about to bite the bullet and purchase my first carbon offsets. This means I will pay an organization to invest in a project that eliminates, reduces or avoids carbon emissions. If I invest in a wind farm, for example, the energy it generates can replace energy from coal burning, which emits a lot of planet-warming gases.
The carbon offset vendor I choose, and there are many to choose from, will calculate how much pollution my particular flight will generate. Then I can pay whatever they calculate it will cost to make up for my share of those emissions through one of their projects.
Although I’ve been reading about carbon offsets for years, I’ve never bought them. I know the carbon market is well established now, and lots of individuals and companies are voluntarily purchasing offsets in an effort to become “carbon neutral.” In fact, the voluntary carbon market accounted for $460 million in transactions worldwide in 2008.
Governments around the world, especially Canada’s, have been fiddling while the planet warms to a dangerous degree. And although climate change can’t be averted without serious government action, voluntary efforts to reduce emissions by individuals, companies and organizations are part of the solution. Besides, I believe in the “polluter pay” principle, and if the airline I choose is not being forced by government to charge me a carbon tax, I can still take personal responsibility for my pollution-causing actions.
But like a lot of people, I’ve been skeptical about this new carbon market and unsure which vendors I can trust. I don’t want to throw my money away. How am I supposed to know which organizations are really doing something good for the climate and which are just placating green-minded folks like me and wasting our money?
Last month, the Pembina Institute and the David Suzuki Foundation, two organizations I respect, released a guide for Canadian consumers, businesses and organizations that ranks the 14 major carbon offset vendors in Canada and six from abroad.
The guide, which you can download at www.davidsuzuki.org, encourages Canadians to reduce emissions as much as possible before resorting to buying offsets. That means driving less, insulating our houses, using less electricity, etc. Once you’ve reduced your carbon footprint as much as you reasonably can, the guide encourages you to choose the highest quality carbon offsets. It ranks vendors based on whether the projects they are investing in are likely to deliver true and permanent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The vendors are also ranked on whether their websites provide clear information about their operations and about climate change.
The guide has raised some hackles, partly because vendors who invest mainly in tree-planting projects lost points in the rankings. For example, ZeroFootprint, the carbon offset vendor to which Air Canada directs travellers on its website, scored only 53 per cent. (ZeroFootprint invests in forest restoration, landfill gas recovery, and tire recycling projects.) Meanwhile, vendors that do mainly renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, like Less, ClimateFriendly and Atmosfair, scored the highest marks.
While the guide stresses that tree-planting projects are great for the environment in many ways, they may not be the surest way to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere.
“Large amounts of carbon stored in trees can quickly be released as a result of forest fires, logging, or disease,” the guide explains. “For the carbon in a tree to be able to offset other emissions and help limit the impacts of climate change, it must be locked up in that tree for at least 100 years – something that is difficult to ensure.”
“We are not against tree planting, obviously,” Matt McCullock, director of corporate consulting with the Pembina Institute said in an interview. “But we are against that being considered a premium carbon offset. Go ahead and plant trees, but don’t go letting someone else pollute because of it.”
McCullock concedes that investing in tree planting offsets may be better than not buying offsets at all. But as a consumer, I’d rather put my money where it will count most.
McCullock cautions this guide is a “snapshot in time” and that consumers need to inform themselves by asking key questions – listed in the guide – of the vendors they are considering. New vendors are constantly coming onto the scene and existing vendors change up their projects, so the rankings probably will be an annual exercise.
I checked out a few of the vendor websites, to see how much it would cost me to offset my 7,000-kilometre return flight to Arizona. The results varied widely. The top-rated Less (www.less.ca) told me my flight would emit the equivalent of 2.6 tonnes of CO2, and that would cost me $121.38 to offset. Offsetters (www.offsetters.ca), which scored about average in the ratings, said my flight would generate 1.4 tonnes of CO2 and cost me $28 to offset. And ZeroFootprint (www.zerofootprint.net), which scored near the bottom of the rankings, said my flight would emit .8 tonnes of CO2 and cost only $12.80 to offset.
It seems that in general, the higher the rating in the guide, the higher the cost of the offsets. As in most things, it costs more to invest in quality. But I, for one, would rather spend more knowing it will have a true and lasting impact, than risk throwing smaller amounts at projects that might do little or nothing to tackle the problem.
By MICHELLE LALONDE, The Gazette
