Dispatches: Great Green Smokescreen

Channel four had an interesting and somewhat concerning episode of Dispatches tonight. The Great Green Smokescreen was all about carbon offsetting and the different ways companies calculate the carbon foot print of you and I. It also illustrated the projects that large multi-national companies are using to offset their carbon emissions.

Like all things on TV nowadays you have to take them with a pinch of salt, but if what they presented is true then it seems that there are a lot of people out there that are being duped into handing over money to companies who claim they are going to offset their carbon emissions.

Personally I've never seen carbon offsetting as a solution to any of the problems we are facing, I think it's great that the projects that are behind carbon offsetting are being done but I don't think there is any need to sell those projects as a way of clearing some ones conscious.

The most interesting part of the program was when they pointed out the fact that the vast majority of the carbon offsetting projects would have gone ahead and can survive easily without the money being given to them by the carbon offsetting companies. The question then becomes what exactly have you paid all that money for if it's not actually going to contribute to running the carbon offsetting projects?

There also seems to be some major holes in some of the projects that are used to offset the carbon. For example one of the major offsetting projects is planting trees, trees have been proven to be possibly the most efficient way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere which obviously makes them a good starting point for offsetting. The only problem is because trees are living things and a natural resource there is no guarantee that they will remove the amount of carbon expected in their lifetime. An entire young forest could die from disease, which would mean they never had a chance to offset the required carbon. Things like forest fires are becoming more and more common around the world, meaning that trees are being burnt and more carbon is being put into the atmosphere instead of being offset. All kinds of things could happen.

Another worrying thing was the fact that some companies were buying the right to sell carbon offsets to people from existing woodland, this would mean you were effectively paying for something that could have been there for hundreds of years naturally growing. In this case you wouldn't have actually added anything new, you would effectively be buying the carbon offsetting power of some ones tree.

None of this seems quite right to me and in some cases I would have thought it could be bordering on fraud. It wouldn't surprise me, if as green issues become more and more popular we'll see a lot of "Carbon offsetting" companies appearing trying to make a quick couple of quid selling people effectively nothing.

The worst part of it all was that none of the companies could agree on how much carbon was emitted on such things as flights. One of the examples was a flight from England to Australia, which was quoted by one company as being about 3 tonnes of CO2 where as another company decided it was going to be 7 tonnes. If these companies are going to take peoples money for this service they provide then surely the least they could do would be to get the calculations right.

All of the companies featured were admittedly funding some very worthwhile projects, most of which were concentrating on re-planting forests and creating more sustainable sources of power, but like the program pointed out most of these projects would still have gone ahead without the money from the carbon offsetting.

I'm still going to work on the principal of prevention is better than cure and recommend that instead of paying someone to offset your carbon footprint why not have a go at reducing it yourself. If you take a look around this site there are plenty of tips to try so why not give it a go.