Do you offset your carbon emissions?
 

Do you (or anyone you know) offset your carbon emissions?
On the BA site, there was a section inviting me to calculate our portion of the carbon emissions for our upcoming flight, Toronto to Paris. For the two of us it was 1.36 tonnes.
I was then asked if I would like to pay the amount required to offset them (10.20 GBP) to a Clean Air Organization.
About as much chance of my doing that as...
Let me phrase it another way...Does ANYONE ever do this?

If i did i would not admit it. tokenism.

I use Beano.

"About as much chance of my doing that as..."

May I finish it with "As snowball in Death Valley in the summertime!"

I don't because I don't buy the "offset" argument. Nor do I buy BA's maths.

Because of the magnifying effect on warming that emissions at 30,000 ft have, most reputable analysts put one person's one-way transatlantic flight at the equivalent of 1.8 tonnes of carbon. Since BA don't fly Toronto-Paris, and therefore robjame had TWO landings/takeoffs each way, the total emissions for Robjame alone were equal to 2.5 tonnes each way.

The two of you - if travelling in cattle - did as much damage (10 tonnes) in a two way trip as the average prudent European did by ALL their activity, in a year. If you were in Club World or First, double the numbers

Now many North Americans might like locking themselves in a fantasy world and pretending none of this matters. Just as Clinton used to boast that no-one cared about terrorism.

Go onto Amazon. Buy Chris Goodall's "Living a Low Carbon Life", which is written with proper West Oxfordshire scepticism, humour and lack of preaching.

Then ask yourself how your grandchildren will think about you.

So what do you do flanner? Take the Bishop of London approach?

He takes the Queen Mary 2.

Hmm - a little limiting in terms of available destinations!

Yesterday on Bavarian TV "BRalpha" they showed a rerun from 1979. Professor Haber on global warming. Not only was it exactly the same thing they say today, including the charts he showed. He even said that "30 years from now, people will face much bigger problem due to increased CO2 than today with the discussion on nuclear energy". Well we (I) didn't care then, why should we care today?

I would suggest that 'clean green' flanner ole chap that you are responsible for way way more carbon emissions than the average person in the world. Me too though i rarely drive or fly.

But it's a conundrum - if the West, especially Europe and especially the U.S. as well as China were to limit their emissions per person to the world average our economy would of course go into the tank.

so the answer may be not to limit such emissions though that is great but hugely fund other approaches - like mirrors in the atmosphere that if defelected just 1% of sunlight would end global warming in its tracks.

or organisms that eat up the ozone pollution.

i suggest all our actions in UK and US needlessly in some form contribute to global warming - needless packaging on every day products - investing in stocks that encourage pollution to gain a profit - heating houses that are way too large for our needs - driving cars too big for what we need - not taking public transit always, etc. etc.

some may be better than others but it's a drop in the bucket. Whilst i am not familiar with the excellent sounding book you recommend i think our societies will not bear to take the really austere steps needed.

Ice in your Martini?

Well flanner, even though we approach the situation from a different point of view, I guess we arrive at the same answer...

"I don't because..."

I also suspect that despite any attempts to foist this off as a North America caused problem, the average "prudent European" thought this about as much in deciding how to combat the problem as the average foolish North American did in causing it.

I don't, though I probably should.

We live a very "low carbon" lifestyle in general (walk or take pub transportation to work, boy locally grown food, shut off lights/appliances when not in use, etc), so I guess that makes up for it?

flanneruk

"I don't because I don't buy the "offset" argument"
"Now many North Americans might like locking themselves in a fantasy world and pretending none of this matters."
"Go onto Amazon. Buy Chris Goodall's"
"Clinton used to boast"
"written with proper West Oxfordshire scepticism", "ask yourself how your grandchildren will think"

Okay, a lot of phraseology and rhetoric but you seem to double back upon yourself. Sorry, but I am somewhat confused by your answer.

I don't because I think it is as PalenQ said "Tokenism".

I don't understand the premise. Does BA mean <u>each of the 175 passengers in a 777</u> emits 1.36 tonnes? That comes out to 280,000 kg, or 616,000 pounds.

That seems somewhat more than I would expect transporting one person would produce.

however you want to figure reliable sounding figures i've heard are that airlines cause about 15% of all harmful emissions worldwide

I'm going to help by turning my computer off - don't forget to turn yours off and not leave it on!

No. The whole idea of offsets sounds to me a bit too much like the papal indulgences of yore: sin at will, just so long as you cough up the dough.

As Martin Luther decided, money might salve the conscience of the sinner, to say nothing of fatten the coffers of the offset collectors - but it doesn't address the basic problem. Emissions aren't going up because taxes (which is what offsets amount to) are too low. BA would do better to start updating its fleet with craft that are more fuel efficient.

And flanner - we're not going to get the problem solved by having a holier-than-thou contest. Our collective mental energy, to say nothing of our other energy expenditures, would be put to better use elsewhere.

Sue - IMHO there is a slight difference between papal indulgences and carbon offsets. Global warming is a fact....

Rob - the 1.36 tonnes was the calculation, return for two people

Sue, &quot;Papal Indulgences&quot; LOL. Haven't thought of that in awhile. When I was a kid, and started to complain about something, my mother would always say &quot;offer it up for the souls in Purgatory&quot;. Just can't beat that old-time religion.

Most of the time in earths history, the climate was much warmer than today, without any polar ice. Life did survive it, who cares if men will cease to exist in a hundered years from now. You don't care about the people that live on a dollar a day either. It's not going away, no matter what you do. Enjoy the party while you can and stop worrying. :-). That's an order!

That's the spirit, logos. Who cares if several billion people die! It's not suffering if I can't see it. Party hearty! There's no way major global climate change could affect all those rich cities along the ocean's edge, or trivial stuff like, you know, agriculture.

wombat, I'm not disputing climate change, I'm disputing the idea of monetary penalties as a supposed solution to the problem.

By the way, papal indulgences are historical fact. (No word yet on whether they bought the purchasers entrance to heaven or not.... ;) )

&gt;agriculture
It just depends who's got the resources. Before everything breaks down, we need to get enough people to do the ugly work of disposing of the bodies. And then let's give free soylent green to everybody. That'll make them happy :-).

fnarf - I think a little bit of that attitude is &quot;healthy&quot;

Didn't build the bomb shelter
Russia didn't nuke us
Never got hit by that asteroid - or the other one
Y2K wasn't too bad
Killer bees never killed
SARS ended
Am eating beef again
Avian flu hasn't wiped us out...yet
Etc., Etc., Etc.

How do you decide when to crawl under the rock? or what to get really worried about

lol

LOL

Look, in a few billion years, the sun will complete its life cycle by turning to a red giant. Its atmosphere will envelop Mars, and every living thing on Earth will be incinerated. There are several more stages in stellar evolution, but we need not concern ourselves with that here.

By finishing off <i>homo sapiens</i> while we can, we will be saving untold future generations all the discomfort and grief of trying to eke out a living on a dying planet.

Sue
Did not mean to imply that indulgences were not a fact – I can still recall snickering in school about the Diet of Worms (fancy eating that). Rather I was implying that spending the money on an indulgence did not get you anywhere. Buying carbon offsets however I think can work – not a question of just paying a penalty rather it is putting money towards doing something to combat the problem. Though IMHO it is too little too late.

Robjame - I was actually surprised that the BA calculation was only 1.36 tonnes for two return from YYZ-CDG Climate Care puts it at 1.67 per person and CarbonNuetral at 1.3 per person

wombat - You're free to think that carbon offsets will work. I'm free to think they won't, or in other words, that they will work as well as papal indulgences. Contrary to what you implied, it does not follow that because I don't believe in the efficacy of carbon offsets, this somehow means I do not believe in the reality of climate change.

Now, to lighten things up: Reading logos' latest reply (about disposing of bodies) I think that now might be a good time to revisit that lovely sketch (inspired by that other great calamity, The Black Death) from Monty Python's &quot;Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail&quot; entitled &quot;Bring out your dead&quot;.

http://tinyurl.com/3wjbm

At cruising altitude, a Boeing 777 consumes 6,000 kg of fuel per hour. Disregarding for the moment the higher consumption during takeoff and climbout, this aircraft would use 96 tonnes of fuel during a 16 hour round-trip YYZ-CDG. Getting to altitude might use double the fuel for an hour.

If ALL of the fuel were converted to carbon (and it's not - there's a lot of water produced, too), the most mass that could result is 102 tonnes. I could calculate exactly how much by solving the chemical equations for combustion of the mixture of hydrocarbon chains that make up JET A, but I'm not going to, because the above figures prove my point: 1.67 tonnes (or even 1.3 tonnes) per passenger is way, way high - maybe as much as an order of magnitude high.

Anybody see a problem with my horseback calculations?

I'm paying someone else to eat right for me so I can pig out so I don't want to pay to have them offset my carbons.

What a joke the offset crap is.

1. 616,000 pounds? The fuel itself doesn't weight anywhere near that much (only 259,000#).
2. Simply assuming the plane burns kerosene (C10H22), and that C=6, o=8. and H=1, the rough atomic weight would be 110 water and 220 for CO2. Or 1/3-2/3. So the CO2 emission would only be 170,000, or about 400 pounds per passenger (420 passengers at capacity)
3. If you're going to cry &quot;the sky is falling&quot;, at least check your numbers out before you parrot the party line.
4. I like the analogy to papal indulgences!

&quot;Emissions aren't going up because taxes (which is what offsets amount to) are too low.&quot;

I hope I'm not misinterpreting that sentence, but it seems to me that that's exactly what's happening. The energy produced by coal-fired power stations, for example, is on paper cheaper than several alternatives under active consideration in this country, &quot;hot rocks&quot; technology being perhaps the most promising. But this is because the downstream costs of heavily polluting coal-fired power are not being accounted for at source, and in fact they receive many subsidies, public and hidden. A carbon tax or a carbon trading scheme (one of which it's generally agreed Australia will adopt sooner rather than later, despite the present government's ostrich act) will go some way to rectifying this.

Of course, the ostriches aren't all at government level. Many of would prefer either not to think about it, or pooh-pooh those who do raise the subject as left-wing wackos. Understandable up to a point, perhaps, but ultimately futile. The problem won't go away just because we'd prefer to maintain our comfortable middle-class lifestyles unchanged.

I like the Beano response best.

But here at our home: we use solar and public transit and telecommute 1 day a week each, and get veggies from a local farm once a week, and donate to some nonprofits that protect forests (and have been doing these things for years except the solar). So no, we don't purchase carbon credits. I don't know who audits those companies anyway to see if they are really following through. I'd rather give to an NGO that I know does great work for the environment.
But the Beano! That's a good one.

Neil_Oz

Yes, I'm aware of the problems of inaccurate accounting of the true cost of this or that product. However, I stand by my claim.

You can't solve the problems of energy emissions by increasing taxes, since taxes are paid out of the self-same energy-driven economy that is driving the emissions problem in the first place. In other words, the production of tax dollars consumes energy (and produces emissions) no differently than the production of any other type of dollars. The response to tax increases in the short term is to decrease consumption of the related product or service, but it works in the long term only if there is a feasible alternative (i.e., energy that is not tied to the tax.) Otherwise, people simply demand wage increases to offset the increased cost of living that results from the higher tax load. Faced with either inflation (i.e., printing more money for the same economic output) or ramping up the economy, politicians will likely work to push the economic engine harder. Given the present link of a given degree of economic performance with a given degree of energy consumption, the result is only too easy to predict.

I know that in theory people ought to respond to shortages, or to government restrictions (as achieved by increasing taxes, say), by decreasing their use of the related resource, but in practice that doesn't happen. People hoard in response to shortages, or increase their exploitation of the resource &quot;while they still can.&quot; Black markets thrive - or in other words, governments lose control as opposed to gaining it.

Political solutions are fraught with the usual political headaches. Years ago, the US attempted to address emissions problems by mandating certain emission controls in passenger vehicles. Light trucks were largely exempted since these were considered a crucial part of agricultural production, amongst other things. (Whether that is true is irrelevant, the point is that political solutions are vulnerable to the usual political lobby groups, and this is not likely to change anytime soon, human nature being what it is.) Anyway, Detroit's response to the controls was to develop new vehicles that were exempt. They mounted a passenger-style vehicle on a truck platform, and the SUV was born. Not exactly what was hoped in the way of reducing emissions!

In Mexico City, the government attempted to decrease the polution problem (a direct result of car exhaust) by mandating that even-numbered license plated cars could drive on certain days of the week, with odd-numbered license-plated cars getting the other three (Sunday was for everyone). Well, the response to this law was that emissions didn't go down, but the production of license plates suddenly enjoyed a exponential increase as the city's drivers simply went out and acquired two plates per vehicle.....

Offsets are a huge distraction from the business of developing real solutions. Making this into a political issue becuase that is what would suit those who make their living from politics (or related industries) is not a good idea. It is the people with the engineering degrees, not the law degrees, we need to be supporting right now. We simply can't afford the waste of time and yes, energy by trying to solve the problem with a horde of bureaucrats, bean-counting (or should that be, offset-counting) away. &quot;You valued that tree-planting offset too high&quot; &quot;No we didn't&quot; and so on.

I knew that SUVs were basically trucks - and a profit windfall for the automakers.

But I didn't know about the emissions mandate tie-in. Sounds like the ultimate case of Unintended Consequences, doesn't it?

I live in an 'enlightenend' well educated town where everyone well knows the perils of Global Warming and its causes.

nevertheless at the nearby Middle School (ages 11-14) there is a parade of at least 200 cars - mainly SUVS with one driver and one kid pull up - and in an area where every child can ride a school bus - people know the problem but refuse to take necessary measures to combat it.

many of these kids live within a mile of school and could walk - others could and should take the school buses that stop near their homes half full because their would be passengers are instead being drivern to school in gaz-guzzling monsters. There are even a few Hummers rolling up to the school with 1 kid in them!

Point is folks will never voluntarily combat emissions unless forced to by law or absurdly high gas prices.

...&quot;I'm not dead yet!&quot;

But I'd sure love some global warming around here, as we enter yet another season 20 degrees cooler than usual.

To save the difficult arithmatic:
Fuel per passenger (Data for B-747).
Fuel = [7840 + 10.1 * (distance-250)] (*2 if return)
(7840 kg take off-climb-descent, 10.1 kg/km cruising).
Passengers, = 370 * [occupancy] (/1.5 if business)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greenhouse warming:
CO2 = fuel * (44/12 * 156/184) (molecular masses)
Total warming effect of CO2,Ozone (made by NOx), water vapour and contrails is about three times greater than effect of CO2 alone

Per &quot;Choose Climate&quot;