Perhaps buying carbon offsets does help September 8, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment , trackbackJames, of High Above Ealing, asked about carbon offsetting in a comment on my previous post, and is planning to use this to reduce the impact of his 3 return trips in six years. As I’ve made 3 return trips in the last six months, I am very impressed at his restraint. The simple answer to the question though is that I don’t know any good carbon offsetting companies, although a quick google reveals a few options.
The longer answer is that I’m not convinced this is the best way to deal with the situation. To me, being green and reducing my impact on the planet is very much about mindfulness, and being aware of the impact of my own actions. Offset schemes seem to me to be a way of trying to buy oneself out of the harm done, particularly when they’re attached to ticket buying sites on, for instance, ba.com.
Looking at BA’s scheme, I’m bemused. Will £13.30 worth of investment in renewable energy really offset a return flight to Johannesburg? That’s less than 5% of a fairly cheap fare there. If so, why are we worrying? Somehow, it doesn’t seem quite right. Maybe its just BAs marketing though, and we should look to other carbon offset companies. I used Climate Care’s calculator to determine that a return flight to Jo’burg would generate 2.62 tonnes of CO2, and could be offset by a £ 19.66 donation. This was similar to driving 9000 miles a year with a petrol engine. It still seems remarkably cheap, although rather more than the BA price.
Is all this sense of impending doom really caused by something that could be offset by so little? My six flights in the last year, plus use of gas and electricity at home, could be offset by £37, less than the cost of dinner for two in my local Italian.
So, I thought I’d do the maths and I was astounded by the results. I was extremely sceptical, and took a look at one Climate Care project was funding 9800 energy efficient lamps in schools to replace the old-fashioned incandescent lamps which use more electricity. Assuming nothing goes wrong (people taking the nice new lightbulbs, replacing the old ones, and then selling the old ones to their mates), how could £19.66 worth of energy efficient lamps ever save 2.62 tonnes of CO2? These lightbulbs use about 70-80% of the electricity of the older ones, have a life of about 10 years and can be bought for about 69p from energy savers direct. Assuming wastage and some overhead, lets say 10 bulbs make it through 10 years of use.
A little googling to figure out that the conversion from kilowatt hours to kilograms of CO2 revealed that a simple factor of 0.592 would do it for ‘general’ electricity generation, and this is what I found. 10 bulbs, used for 10 years, four hours a day will save an amazing 7 tonnes of CO2. That’s rather more than the amount generated by the trip to South Africa.
| low energy | normal | |
| number of bulbs | 10 | 10 |
| Wattage of bulbs | 20 | 100 |
| multiply and divide by 1000 for kiloWatts |
0.2 | 1 |
| hours / 10 years | 14600 | 14600 |
| kW-hrs | 2920 | 14600 |
| divide by 0.594 to get kg of CO2 |
1734 | 8672 |
| in tonnes | 2 | 9 |
| saving in tonnes of CO2 | 7 |
There are other issues to consider - offsetting extravagant use in the UK by charitable work in developing countries fails to recognise that we are one of the worst polluters on the planet. Are there really enough opportunities of this kind to absorb more than a fraction of the CO2 we generate? If we think we can just export our CO2 emissions in this way, will we ever actually reduce them?
I’d appreciate it if someone would check my numbers and assumptions, and tell me if I’ve got this right. Its doesn’t seem to be as blatantly bad as I’d thought, and would be worth doing.
Technorati Tags: carbon offsets, CO2
Comments»
The latest edition of the New Internationalist available online has a load of stuff on carbon offsetting, little of it particularly complimentary, including this article on Climate Care’s project: http://www.newint.org/features/2006/07/01/south-africa/
(On an unrelated note, your comments do some very weird things in Firefox.)
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that we’re one of the world’s greatest polluters. We only need to look around us to see how a large number of Brits feel when it comes to the environment. If they’re happy to dump their waste in the streets, on farmland and in what little forest we have left, they’re hardly going to worry about something like carbon offsetting. How sad we are as a nation!