What happened to carbon offsets?

In a few weeks I'll be flying with my wife to go and visit her family for a week, then on to New York to speak at a conference about marketing, then back here to San Francisco. In those two weeks, I'll create more than 1300 kg of greenhouse gasses per flight. That's over 4000 kg I'm responsible for putting into the atmosphere, and there are going to be hundreds of people on those planes with me.

Plane travel is one of the biggest culprits of greenhouse gas emissions for individuals. As a quick example, EU greenhouse gas emissions from airlines went up 87 percent between 1990 and 2006. That's a significant increase that shows we're still headed in the same direction we were before we started talking about all this.

Five years ago I was starting my journey as a writer, and one of the first groups I worked with was the Carbon Advice Group. Our mission was to get people information about how they could reduce their carbon footprint on the environment and connect them with some solutions, like carbon offsets.

The idea with carbon offsets was that if someone was going to take a big trip, say like the one I'm about to go on, you could use a "carbon offset calculator" to figure out how much CO2 you were going to create and purchase "offsets" to neutralize the impact. For example, I could pay to plant 12 trees to offset my three plane rides, assuming that the lifetime use of CO2 by those trees would equal the amount I was releasing into the atmosphere.

It appealed to people as a way to halt climate change. It appealed to people because it meant you didn't have to change your habits. It appealed to people because it could be turned into business, including an entirely separate exchange where carbon offsets were traded like stocks. There were high hopes that we could collectively make a difference and turn the damage we were all doing around and instead learn to be stewards of the environment.

It didn't work.

When was the last time you heard about carbon offsets? Exactly. So, what happened?

1. Higher prices: Let's be honest. Nobody wants to voluntarily pay more for a plane ticket or anything else. We all complain when gas goes up by a nickel. The idea of tacking another $20 on to a plane ticket to pay for trees we would never see just lost its luster. Especially when the global economy tanked.

2. Carbon offset companies lied: Yeah. Unfortunately, many of the offsetting companies were making claims that just weren't true. Some of them flat out lied and just didn't plant the trees they said they did, while others saw their plans for carbon sequestration go up in smoke when they didn't work out as planned, and still others just fudged the numbers and put more of the cash in their pockets than toward "carbon offsetting."

3. Behaviorism: The same problem that plagues the entire environmental movement played out on the smaller scale of carbon offsetting. There are no immediate consequences for not taking care of the environment. While we hear a lot of gloom and doom in the news and from scientists, it still hasn't made its way to our living room. We have a hard time acting on something until it's sitting on the floor in front of us. Carbon offsetting was addressing a problem we didn't see in our daily lives with a solution we also didn't see in our daily lives. That's a tough sell to keep going.

So, what now?

If you are still motivated to purchase carbon credits to offset your own impact, you can use an organization like the Verified Carbon Standard to get reliable information and make sure that your money goes where it is supposed to go.

For me, I'm a bit disillusioned, and I don't spend much time thinking about carbon credits anymore. Not because I think they're horrible, but because I think the theory behind them is the wrong one as a guiding principle.

Carbon credits are about paying someone else to neutralize my own behavior. I'm more interested in making changes to my behavior to minimize my own impact in the first place. Instead, I focus on the things I can and am doing to reduce that impact, like composting, biking instead of driving and choosing to spend extra money on environmentally-conscious food and other products.

Does that equal out the impact from me flying all over the country? No, it doesn't. I'm leaving that to the plane companies and the government to shift their thinking as public opinion shifts. And I'm keeping myself active in shaping that public opinion. Hopefully I'll be part of integrating the idea behind offsets into the planning for different activities in the future, making them more environmentally-friendly from the get-go.

Image courtesy of xjki via flickr