CivicActions

That's great! I fully support planting trees for a variety of reasons, including improving the urban setting, absorbing carbon, etc. However, I have thought about this a little bit, and the idea that planting trees is truly offsetting petroleum fuel carbon emissions is a bit of a mistake. Here is my thoughts:

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it as woody material in their trunks, roots, branches and leaves. When the tree dies, or when the leaves fall off, and that woody material rots away, it releases that carbon back into the environment, where it'll be absorbed by other plants. (This is the "carbon cycle"). The amount of carbon cycling around in the biosphere has remained roughly constant before the industrial revolution.

Petroleum fuel comes from plants, too. Oil, gas, and coal used to be plants around, maybe, 50 million years ago. Obviously, they were plants living in a swamp, which, when they died, didn't decompose and release their carbon, but instead that carbon was 'sequestered' for the millions of years, until it was found and pumped out by Exxon. And then burned by Delta in a jet engine.

The trees you plant may absorb a mass of carbon equal to the amount you emitted as part of ones transportation ... but that carbon isn't really gone from the atmosphere, it is just tied up temporarily in the mass of the wood of the trees.

Don't get me wrong here- I fully support planting trees as an investment in our future, and as a means of smoothing out the introduction of carbon to the atmosphere. Carbon cap and trade systems are an important piece of the puzzle towards eventually reducing our carbon footprint. Programs like TerraPass have all kinds of benefits, not the least of which is jsut getting folks to think about their carbon footprint.

But, we need to recognize the sources and destinations of the carbon-based energy we consume.

Hey, I gotta say i'm skeptical, but for other reasons than jim.

I fully support the "pollutor pays" principle, but not if it means "pollutor pays as long as s/he can afford to, and feels guilty enough". Furthermore, 'paying in' in this case doesn't seem to act as a disincentive to flying, as a good pollutor pay regime should. An article in the Aug 5 Economist, though extremely favourable to the idea of credits, astutely compared these programs to buying atonement from the Vatican. And now companies like BP, which failed miserably to convince the world 5 years ago that it was now "Beyond Petroleum", is using these schemes as ways of buying atonment from a public that is increasingly pissed about the role of oil giants in destroying life on this planet.

The Economist folks would, with little scientific evidence, disagree with Jim's point that "not all carbon sequestration is the same". In fact they woud say that Jim is "politicising" the issue of offsets, which interferes with their neoliberal vision for making everything a commodity that can be exchanged using simplified (artificial) markets.

I think we will see in the coming months (Christmas?) as these programs become more and more popular that that carbon traders and greenwash marketing firms are benefitting from these programs a lot more than the atmosphere.

I recognize, however when it comes down to it the positive educational value of these schemes mentioned by Jim might outweigh the negative role that i seem them playing in cutting short our demands for a fully implemented MANDATORY curb on emissions by the biggest pollutors. I guess we'll take what we can get.

-kev

Subjecting our atmosphere to the whims of the stock market also seems a bit sketchy. In May 2006 the price of a carbon credit (traded in tons of CO2) dropped from 31 euros to 9 euros overnight, and then recovered to 16 euros. Suddenly the incentive to save on emissions was dramatically reduced. Eventually i suppose they will go back up and reach a so-called "price equilibrium", but gimme a break... how much are the trading companies making off all these transactions, anyway?

-kev