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ECOCLUB, Issue 92
Offsets & Tourism - Green action or greenwash?
by Kevin Smith*
From Al Gore, to Coldplay, to resorts the world over, carbon offsetting is the latest way to express one’s green credibility. The
voluntary offset market is booming – already with revenue in the billions, market commentators say that it will quadruple in size
in the next four years. But behind the feel good hype of ‘having your carbon cake and eating it too,’ what exactly are people
being sold when they purchase carbon offsets and what sort of message are they contributing to the climate change discourse?
In the last year there has been a growing groundswell of criticism of offset schemes, to the point where the Carbon Neutral
Company, one of the market pioneers, had its head office in London occupied in February 2007 by a climate change action
group, who accused them of breeding a dangerous complacency with regards to climate change.
More and more individual projects are being exposed as being badly implemented, managed, monitored or not having as much
benefit to the climate as they have been claimed. Up till now the market has been entirely unregulated. Offsets expert Francis
Sullivan, who was instrumental in HSBC’s attempt to ‘neutralise’ its emissions, commented that, “there will be individuals and
companies out there who think they're doing the right thing but they're not. I am sure that people are buying offsets in this
unregulated market that are not credible. I am sure there are people buying nothing more than hot air.”(1)
Any eco-tourism outfit that associates itself with an offset company invariably risks being associated with the negative publicity
that the exposure of such projects brings. For example, a UK-based African tour operator that prides itself on responsible travel
policy ‘offsets’ its flight emissions through an offset company based in the UK. In March 2007, The Independent published an
article showing that the offset company had “sunk thousands of pounds of consumers' money into a project without knowing
how far it has cut carbon emissions.” The project involved the installation of solar cookers in central America, but two years
after the project had been undertaken it had not been audited, and money from the offset company had been merged with money
from other sources so that it was impossible to tell exactly how much ‘climate benefit’ the offset funding had been responsible
for.(2)
Many other offset companies and therefore tour operators have faced similar bad publicity. In April 2006, the Sunday Telegraph
reported that 40% of the 8,000 mango saplings that a carbon offsetter had planted in southern India to offset the making of a pop
album had died, with their project partner in India claiming that “They [the offsetter] do it for their interests, not really for
reducing emissions. They do it because it’s good money.”(3).
These, and many other stories relate to the problems of individual projects, but there are methodological issues that relate to all
offsets in that it is simply not possible to accurately quantify emissions reductions when you are reliant on very speculative
scenarios in your measurements.
The credits that an offsets project generates are calculated by subtracting the emissions of the world that has the project in it
from the emissions of an otherwise-identical possible world that doesn’t. This last world represents the “baseline”. The quantity
of offsets credits that are generated and available to sell is equivalent to the emissions reductions beyond this baseline.
In order for the system to work, this baseline has to be accurately determined. Without an accurate baseline, sellers wouldn’t
know how much of their commodity they were actually selling, and buyers wouldn’t know how much they were buying. The
assessment by experts and verifiers of the hypothetical scenario without the project is, at best, informed guesswork. Many
without-project scenarios are always possible. As Larry Lohmann points out in his treatise on carbon trading, “The choice of
which one to be used in calculating carbon credits is a matter of political decision rather than economic or technical
prediction.”(4)
There are innumerable factors that could alter the baseline of the without-project scenario, such as socio-economic trends, future
land use, demographic changes and international policymaking. As Jutta Kill from the FERN campaign network points out, “if
the carbon market had been active in 1988 then East Germany would have been a prime target for energy saving projects. But
how many predictions of baseline emissions would have included the fall of the Berlin wall the following year?" (5)
Much of the baseline speculation relates to the principle of “additionality” – that is, the idea that the project would not have
happened without the funding from the offset companies. A report by the Royal Institute for International Affairs flatly
acknowledges the “impossibility of measuring and defining savings that are additional to those that would have occurred in the
absence of emissions credits.”(6)
A more definite resolution to the question of whether or not a project would have happened anyway “seems as elusive as ever”,
according to Mark Trexler, a climate change business consultant. “There is no technically ‘correct’ answer,” he concedes.
“Never has so much been said about a topic by so many, without ever agreeing on a common vocabulary and the goals of the
conversation.” (7)
While scientists, using appropriate instruments and calibrations, are able to agree on how to directly measure real emissions,
there is no consensus possible on how to accurately choose one genuine baseline out of the multitude of possibilities and
