Word: offsets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...what's good for the carbon offsetting business good for the environment? That's open to debate. Voluntary carbon offsetting is an unlicensed industry, and without a common regulator to police the projects and companies pledging to shrink emissions, offset providers have come up with a raft of competing rules and practices, not all of them with the credibility customers expect...
...just in planting trees, but also in ensuring they thrive. But others may not be so diligent and disease, fire and logging can all shorten a tree's life. "You can never be sure the atmosphere sees the benefit," says Dietrich Brockhagen, managing director of atmosfair, a Berlin-based offset provider that avoids reforestation schemes...
While some firms, like PC maker Dell, are still willing to sponsor major reforestation initiatives, others aren't taking chances. HSBC steered clear of trees when it successfully offset 170,000 tons of its emissions for the last quarter of 2005 through investments in renewable energy projects. "However many trees we planted around the world, we could not keep up [with global CO2 output]", says Francis Sullivan, the bank's environment adviser. HSBC looks, he says, for more efficient uses of its money, such as its investment in a wind farm in New Zealand. Tree planting, Sullivan says...
...even that is easier said than done. How can ordinary consumers be sure that their contributions toward, say, building solar greenhouses in the Himalayas is money well spent? Without global or even national regulators becoming involved, standards in the offset industry have become a free-for-all. It seems obvious, for example, that a project should reduce emissions below the level that would have occurred without that project, a condition known as "additionality." But that's not always the case. Thanks to hazy interpretations of that proviso, "at least half" of current projects wouldn't meet a uniformly strict assessment...
...finite number of major global standards would be good news for consumers, even if they've been a little slow in coming. Big corporations and governments already benefit from a common system of approving offset projects under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. With a common set of rules, voluntary offsetting could see its ranks of followers - and the market's credibility - grow further. That's fine, say many environmental advocates, but they also say customers should be focusing more on cutting emissions in the first place. "Offsets can be seen as an easy...