Now You See It, Now You Don't (II)
In the world of smoke and mirrors - of striving to construct some method by which honour can be salvaged and an attempt can be seen to be made to alleviate the world conscience of the mess we've made of our environment - was born the expedient notion of carbon credits. In emergencies, any lifeboats, however riddled with holes, offer a glimmer of rescue from perdition.And so, routinely now, the indoctrination has fired up peoples' determination to save their environmental souls by green credit. The carbon-offset market was born. No pangs of conscience now need trouble those who espouse environmental responsibility and win global acclaim, and Oscars and Nobel Peace prizes while living wastefully ostentatious lives as long as they energetically trade in carbon offsets.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences has gone to the trouble of purchasing credits representing the elimination of 100,000 pounds of emissions reductions. This will be revealed during the Oscars presentations next month and the little statuette will feel really good about its responsibilities to the planet. Just coincidentally, 100,000 pounds of emissions appear equivalent to the annual "celebrity lifestyle" output.
That's one huge relief.
World travellers who must jet around the world on business or personal enterprise, or simply social jet-setting, no longer are made to feel badly about adding to rising greenhouse gases; they simply neutralize the effects. After all, if the world stage environmental conference reflecting the determination of the United Nations to battle this world-class problem, assembling world actors in a luxury south-east destination to discuss the environmental disasters awaiting us all, piously earning their credits by carbon trading, we've no worries.
"Carbon neutrality" consists of a transaction whereby the seller uses the offset funds to create an environmental benefit that could not occur by any other means. Companies who generate carbon credits must engage in performing some environmental tasks they would otherwise not have done. Easily said, as an hypothesis, but a trifle more exacting to observably prove.
In most instances the proceedings simply consist of a transfer of wealth to soothe guilty consciences. Sending offset funds from wealthy nations to those who are emerging economically and who do so through the process of utilizing outdated, outmoded and environmentally detrimental methods of energy production. How the environment benefits by this transaction is rather a problem yet to be met. But it could be of the funds were utilized to completely replace the old energy plants.
A Business Week report enquiring into whether companies that sell off-set credits have altered their deleterious practises as a result of additional revenue elicited this response: "No, but they were happy to have the money." Further, if funds are provided for tree planting, who ensures the trees won't be harvested in the near future? If the provision of such funding allows for the delay or halting of a deleterious coal-fired plant in one part of a country, yet enables the building of the same plant elsewhere in another part of the country, where is the benefit?
The fact is, carbon-credits have become yet another marketing tool, a profit-making enterprise, enthusiastically embraced by those who sign on to the fiction they're helping the environment, and gladly accepted by those who stand to make a whole pile of money out of the enterprise. Case in point: unless the buyer of offset credits takes the step of insisting on strict standards on the seller, the seller may accept the offset funding and continue to do whatever was being done regardless.
It's not that these dealers are unscrupulous we're informed; they are business enterprises, getting away with whatever they can, and in the process also absorbing additional funding. While in the process of installing some energy infrastructure, they also stand to receive funding: "subsidies", that happen to make others feel better about themselves.
After all, it's the environmental elites, the legislators, the corporate interests involved who are leading the way. The U.S. House of Representatives is proud of its purchase of 30,000 tonnes of offsets enabling the U.S. congress to be carbon neutral. While the Capital Building is powered by an old coal-burning generator. Wouldn't the funding be better spent replacing the dirt-spewing generator, and in the process obviate the need to salve the collective conscience?
People going about their business seem oblivious to all of this, they're happy in the continuance of the fiction, as buyers and sellers.
Labels: Environment, Realities, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, January 05, 2008
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