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Sustainable Energy Blog was launched in July 2005, and is Leonardo ENERGY's longest running blog, covering technology, policy, finance, roadmaps, actors, ...
Beware of the carbon cowboys!
Submitted by Hans Nilsson on Wed, 2007-05-02 07:00.
Financial Times issues a warning that the interest (and necessity) to act in order to stop the climate change also creates a wild west with carbon-offsetting cowboys! And indeed this is an important warning! As has been mentioned on this site before there is a risk that many of the concerned people, who may have more money than experience and judgement, also attracts less serious companies who make use of the situation.
The main problems as listed by FT are:
- Pure fraud (the project does not exist)
- No additionality (the offset would have happened anyway)
- Double counting (the same object is sold many times)
Does it not sound as the plot from the wild-west movies!
But it is good that there are focus on all attempts to get away too easily. The carbon sheriff, Al Gore, just denounced the Canadian climate plan as a fraud. Harsh words, but better now than when it is too late.
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a fourth one
I would add a fourth problem, even when avoiding the previous three: the cost of carbon is a market price, driven by supply and demand, but also by the strength of the regulatory framework. The EU's ETS, with its high penalty for non-compliance (100 euro/tonne in phase 2) is a strong driver. The voluntary market much less so. There is no guarantee that the CO2 price is cost-reflective, and hence purchasing a carbon offset for a tonne of CO2 emissions may offset only a fraction of a tonne in reality.
This being said, there are a lot of good projects in the voluntary market, executed against high standards, and the FT's coverage has been - shall we say - selective.