Carbon offsets no green magic wand: experts
NO EMISSIONS BEST
Carbon offsets should not be relied upon as a loophole to justify carbon emissions, say environmental experts.
“The real danger with carbon offsetting is, it allows us to say we are doing things we are not actually doing,” said Kate Ervine, a professor of international development studies at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia. “For instance, with flying — you aren’t lowering emissions overall just because you purchase carbon offsets.”
Scrutiny into carbon offsets as a mechanism to cancel out the carbon footprint from air travel comes as the Conservatives revealed Wednesday night that the Liberal Party was using not one, but two planes for the entirety of its campaign. In a statement released during the TVA French language debate, the Conservatives pegged Liberal leader Justin Trudeau as a “high carbon hypocrite” for “lecturing everybody else” on emissions but using “two aircraft to campaign.”
In his defence, Trudeau said his party purchased carbon offsets for both planes and the Liberal buses to mitigate the environmental damage of his party’s campaign travel.
But the president of the company that the Liberal Party purchased those carbon offsets from said that the offset mechanism is “not the ultimate solution” to the problem of carbon emissions. “The ideal is not to emit carbon in the first place,” said Sean Drygas, president of Bullfrog Power, a renewable energy provider.
The Liberals refused to say how much they paid for the carbon offsets.
Carbon offsets are a credit system of sorts for greenhouse gas reduction that can be purchased to compensate emissions.
An example of carbon offsetting is planting trees — if a flight from Toronto to Vancouver generated 0.5 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide, carbon offsetting in this case would mean planting enough trees to remove 0.5 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
But they are controversial, with some environmental critics saying they are being used to buy a clean conscience.
In a blog post, Niklas Hagelberg, a senior program officer at UN Environment, wrote recently, “Buying carbon credits in exchange for a clean conscience while you carry on flying, buying diesel cars and powering your homes with fossil fuels is being challenged by people concerned about climate change.”
According to Drygas, the Liberal Party paid for one of his company’s carbon offsetting projects in the Windsor, Ont., area that involved reducing the amount of emissions in a landfill by collecting and destroying methane gas.
“Many projects like this cannot get built unless someone will pay to operate it. So for the owner of the landfill, in order to get a return on investing in this technology to convert the methane, you need someone to pay you an additional amount,” Drygas said.
A calculation of carbon emissions from the second Liberal plane, based on flight logs issued by the Conservatives, showed that between Sept. 16 and Oct. 1, the second plane’s carbon footprint was approximately 2.5 metric tonnes. That calculation, however, is measured on a per-passenger basis and it is not known how many people were actually on the second plane which was used primarily to transport cargo for the Liberals.
A greenhouse gas emissions equivalencies calculator on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s website estimates that mitigating 2.5 tonnes of carbon emissions, would require planting 41.3 trees and having them grow for at least 10 years.
“Conservatives have their own issues on climate change, but what I would say is carbon offsetting is not intended to reduce emissions. It’s not as simple as, ‘I can continue doing what I want as long as I offset’,” said Ervine, the Nova Scotia professor and author of Carbon, a book that looks at the problems of carbon pollution.