How does buying ‘offsets’ save the environment?

The press is complaining that the Conservatives are the only national party that didn’t buy any offsets for the flying around they are going to do during this election campaign. That makes them an environmentally unfriendly party.

I am concerned that ‘buying offsets’ is now seen as being “environmentally friendly”, and if you don’t buy them, you’re some sort of bastard who doesn’t care this planet is going to waste. Nobody has of yet been able to explain to me how buying offsets is cleaning up the environment. You’re still flying around the country. You’re still driving that car. You just feel better about it. I have written before in my blog, the majority of these carbon credit offset selling companies will plant a vague number of trees for this money. And that is only found out after prying: go visit any number of Carbon Credit companies, and you’ll be hard pressed to find what they are actually going to do with the money. They use vague terms like “We need to put back the trees that have been cut down” and “Change human behaviour” or “Offset: what you can’t reduce today with certified offsets “. After prying, for some companies it comes out to be about 20,000 trees per $1,000,000 worth of credits. It may sound like a large number of trees, but 20,000 trees is what one good tree planter can plant in about 10 days. And those trees would have been planted anyway (there are about 600,000,000 trees planted in Canada every year by the logging industry), but these 20,000 have found a sponsor other than the logging business: you. The cost of planting 20,000 trees is about $10,000. That makes a profit of $990,000. For the OFFSET SELLER. So now we have 20,000 trees planted, $990,000 profit for the offset seller, and a certificate in your hand that you may now fly across the country guilt-free. Where in this story did the air get cleaned up? Oh, people will say, the planted trees will absorb the CO2 and thereby offsetting your pollution. Well, 1) Those trees would have been planted anyway, and 2) When that tree dies, it’ll burn, or rot, releasing all its CO2 right back into the atmosphere. You haven’t eliminated your CO2, you paid to have it stored in a tree for about 80 years after which it’ll go right back where it came from.

And all this is assuming CO2 is a bad polluting gas. Which it isn’t.

There is no science behind these offsets: it is the brain child of Mr. Kyoto himself, Maurice Strong, in a scheme to funnel large bundles of cash to China, a country he and Jean Chretien (who signed on so eagerly to the Kyoto protocol) had heavily invested in just before all this started. All this influx of cash made the Chinese economy boom, instantly making all their investors filthy rich. Small town cheap became nouveau riche pretty quick, on the backs of us all.

I am happy the Conservatives aren’t falling for this offsetting carbon credit crap. Good for you. Don’t let anybody tell you different.

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