Carnal Reason

If you can’t afford to buy carbon indulgences offsets, here’s another way to reduce your carbon footprint.

Speaking of carbon offsets, even the Economist agrees that they do not work.

The carbon offsets, on the other hand, sound like a very reasonable plan. That is, they did until I began thinking about them.

Most carbon offsets seem to work on one of a few principles: they plant trees, invest in renewable energy sources, or pay someone in a developing country to use some less-polluting technology, like a CFL.

It turns out that a lot of websites have already devoted quite a lot of space to discussing why these plans don’t work particularly well. Calculating one’s carbon output, and the carbon savings from various offsets, is very tricky and may be manipulated by unscrupulous offset firms. Trees take quite a long time to get to the stage where they are actually absorbing all that carbon—and tend to die shortly thereafter, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere, there to wreak havoc. By legitimating carbon usage, offset companies may actually be increasing it.

But surprisingly few make what, to me, seems like a more basic point: energy is a tradable market good. It is not as if there is some fixed demand for energy, so that by using less carbon-emitting energy, you actually decrease the amount of carbon emitted.

This is, of course, ridiculous. When you donate money to build a new windfarm, you don’t take any of the old, polluting power offline; you increase the supply of power, reducing the price until others are encouraged to buy more carbon-emitting power. On the margin, it may make some difference, since demand for electricity is not perfectly elastic, but nowhere near the one-for-one equivalence that carbon offsets would seem to suggest. Especially since the worst offenders, big coal-fired plants, are not the ones that renewables will substitute for; solar and wind power are not good replacements for baseload power. Instead, renewables are likely to take relatively clean (and expensive) natural gas plants offline, since those are the ones that provide “extra” power to the system. Similarly, by giving villagers in Goa energy-saving CFL bulbs, you do not lessen the amount of electricity consumed; rather, you make it possible for other people to purchase the extra energy freed up by more efficient lightbulbs. This may be excellent poverty policy, but it does not lessen the carbon footprint of your international flight.

The Economist misses the point. Plenary indulgences are a religious matter. Al Gore is extremely wealthy, and he lives like an extremely wealthy man. But Al Gore is one of the Latter Day Saints of Gaia, one famous for his demands that the rest of us sacrifice our children’s lifestyles to his goddess.

The way out of this impasse is to absolve Mr. Gore of his apparent hypocrisy via carbon offsets, which I prefer to call indulgences. To doubt the efficacy of these indulgences is heresy.

Carbon indulgences may not alter the actual use of carbon, but they certainly alter the essential use (in the Aristotelean sense) of carbon. The essential use of carbon is not subject to physical measurement or perception, but we know as an article of faith that Mr Gore is green, ergo the indulgences are efficacious.

Posted on February 28th, 2007 by pwyll
Filed under: cartoon, religion