Ross Clark
tree is standing. If one day it dies or is cut down, then the carbon will be returned to the atmosphere. As for buying an African village a set of solar panels, that is only effective if you assume they were about to install some dirtier form of power instead.
Carbon offsetting is just greenwashing – a token effort at being environmentally friendly in order to assuage your own sense of guilt and to boast to others how virtuous you have been. As far as these celebs are concerned, cutting carbon emissions is for the plebs.
As for the general population, many of us are making an effort. Yesterday, it was revealed that use of plastic bags has fallen by half in a year. Many of us are using the car less, flying less and switching to appliances which use far less electricity. Few of us are buying electric cars, most of them being priced at levels which make them affordable only as playthings for the wealthy, but British motorists as a whole are shunning diesels and switching to smaller, more efficient petrol models.
Since 1990, the carbon emissions produced worldwide in the cause of providing goods and services for UK consumers has fallen by about 10 per cent. Yes, of course it would be good if we could reduce emissions much faster than we are doing, but there are huge technical hurdles to overcome. For example, while wind and solar power have become much cheaper as the technology has improved, there remains the issue of how we store electricity from these intermittent sources. It might be that one day we will have much more efficient batteries – or perhaps we will build hydrogen plants to store the energy.
What have the celebrities Google’s Climate Camp got at to contribute to this? Absolutely nothing. Leonardo DiCaprio or Katy Perry aren’t going to be inventing some miracle new form of green energy.The hard work is being done by anonymous engineers and scientists beavering away in workshops and laboratories – while the world’s glitterati try to soak up the credit for the world going green.
NOW if celebrities really want to earn environmental Brownie points they can forget trying to hector the rest of us. They should be skipping events like Google’s Climate Camp, ditching private jets and travelling only by commercial planes. They should be downsizing homes and organising their lifestyles so they don’t need to travel nearly so much.
But what exposure would that earn them on the global stage? The sad truth is that if you are a celebrity in the make or are trying to revive a flagging career, the more overblown and ridiculous your lifestyle, the better. It helps attract attention and keep you in the spotlight. That is the real purpose of events like Google Climate Camp – to give people an opportunity to show off. The environment comes a very poor second.