Leave it to the forests to destroy the world…
Jun.09, 2006, filed under Miscellany
There’s an interesting article in this month’s East journal comparing carbon credits and neutralisation to Catholic plenary indulgence.
Plenary indulgence was, of course, the pin upon which the film Dogma hinged. I liked the part where Serendipity the Muse says: “The plenary indulgence loophole? …Leave it to the Catholics to destroy existence.” Anyone who has ever been in the company of a bunch of grizzled old Gimps whinging to one another will recognise that particular form of griping.
So anyway, Bill Leverett makes the point that not all the offsetting programmes out there are good, and a lot of them are just cashing in on people’s environmental guilt. The plenary indulgence loophole about which Serendipity was so scathing was one of the factors that led to the Protestant reformation, largely because of aggressive, unscrupulous selling of indulgences that didn’t really do what they were supposed to.
A good scheme should have additionality: no point claiming to be neutralising your impact if your money is just going to support something that would have happened with or without you coughing up for it. It should have permanence: fossil fuels are releasing carbon from a permanent store into the atmosphere, and so anything that can release and will release the carbon you pay to be sequestered isn’t doing the job of compensating. It should have simultaneity: in order to mitigate the effect on the climate, an equivalent amount of carbon should be sequestered at roughly the same time as that being released. Finally, it should be obvious that we should be able trust the project: you need to know that your money is being spent on locking carbon away to make up for that which your activities are releasing, otherwise there is absolutely no point.
This raises an obvious issue with the most popular carbon neutralising projects, which involve trees. Trees eventually die and the carbon they store goes back into the cycle. Also, a tree will eventually reach the point where it will no longer store any additional carbon. They also fail on simultaneity.
Unfortunately the only real solution is to reduce your carbon footprint in the first place. But in the meantime, don’t get caught out in the plenary indulgence loophole: if we buy into that too much then we’re going to end up sorely disappointed.
Leave a Reply
-
Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
