Why carbon neutrality is a delusion

Here is a link to my brief report written in 2011 entitled "BC’s Carbon Neutral Public Sector: Too Good to be True?"  explaining why carbon neutral government is a delusion and what to do about it. 

*Please note, this document takes between 10-20 seconds to load and you will first get a blank screen.  The file will then load to that screen.  Thanks for your patience! 

The Case of Carbon Neutrality

By Mark Jaccard

Originally published in Alternatives Journal, 2011

Starting with a commitment at a G7 meeting in 1988, the world’s most powerful political leaders have frequently acknowledged the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, yet over two decades later, an effective global effort has not materialized. Political leaders talk about the need for an international agreement, but have failed to achieve it. They have set ambitious targets and implemented long policy lists, but these have been largely ineffective. 

Over these past two decades, political scientists and economists, among others, have offered explanations for our inability to take effective action to avert climate change. I have focused on our propensity to implement policies that are less effective in reducing emissions than we tell ourselves. In particular, we frequently rely on voluntary approaches, such as information programs and subsidies that try to convince firms and individuals to change technologies or behaviour. Canada’s Voluntary Challenge and Registry, for example, asked industry to record all of its voluntary actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Since firms frequently take actions that inadvertently reduce emissions, such as acquiring more efficient devices, it is no surprise that industry produced long lists of emissions reductions. Governments happily trotted them out for the media, downplaying the fact that, at an aggregate level, emissions were still rapidly rising.

The latest fad is “carbon neutrality” – paying someone to reduce their emissions by an amount that equals your emissions. Since their emissions reduction “offsets” your emissions, you become “carbon neutral.” Carbon neutrality is now big business, with millions of dollars in subsidies passing from individuals, firms and governments to companies that claim to cause emissions reductions that would otherwise not have occurred. Offset companies, which make a commission on the exchange between offset buyers and sellers, are highly motivated to ensure that everyone sees carbon offsetting as an effective means of reducing emissions.

Buying your way to innocence sounds too good to be true. It probably is.

The offset industry tells us it provides emissions reductions that would not otherwise have occurred – in essence, “verified additionality.” But we cannot be certain what would have occurred in the absence of an offset subsidy. Since we cannot run history twice, the best we can do is examine past subsidy programs. 

This has led researchers such as me to focus on the subsidies for energy efficiency and fuel switching offered by some utilities and governments. This hindsight research has generally found that many of these subsidies, sometimes more than half, went to individuals and firms that would have acquired the more efficient devices anyway. Even subsidies to plant trees on agricultural land (to store carbon) are suspect, since analysts assessed that shifting land away from agriculture can increase the price of agricultural land, thereby inducing some forest owners to switch their land back to agriculture – in effect offsetting the offset.

So if carbon neutrality is one more policy delusion, what should we do instead? It is not a surprise that the answer is simple, albeit one we prefer to avoid. We need to prohibit emitting greenhouse gases or make it expensive. This requires pricing emissions (carbon tax or cap-and-trade) and/or strict regulations on technologies such as cars and electricity plants. And we need to apply these policies to activities that are now the focus of offset activities, such as energy efficiency, fuel switching, afforestation, agriculture, and capturing emissions from urban landfills and industrial processes.

Will we do this? Maybe. But if the past two decades are a guide, we are more likely to stick with policies such as offsets, which have minimal impact and cause little offense. This is a key reason why it is a long shot that humans will act in time to avert serious disruption to the planet. 

Carbon neutral public sector: a myth B.C. cannot afford

By Mark Jaccard
Originally published in the Vancouver Sun July, 2011

On June 30, the B.C. government announced it had become “carbon neutral.” Do you know
what this means?

If you’re unsure, you’re not alone. Pollsters find most people are. But some vaguely understand that being carbon neutral absolves them from guilt because, by paying someone else to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (especially carbon dioxide), they are somehow no longer causing climate change when taking an airplane. Like paying someone else to do penance, you still emit carbon, but no longer feel guilty about your impact on the Earth’s climate, ecosystems and people.

The carbon neutral industry is growing. There are the guilty parties: individuals and companies who want or must become carbon neutral. They pay money to people who reduce their emissions: “carbon offset providers.” The two parties find each other thanks to “offset brokers,” companies that verify the emission reductions and get a commission from each transaction. Finally, there is government, which sanctions the offset industry and may, as in the case of B.C., even set its own goals for being carbon neutral.

Saving the planet by paying money instead of reducing your emissions sounds too good to be true. Experts say it is, but no one is listening.

The reasons are quite simple. The people who are paid to reduce emissions do things like switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy, invest in energy efficiency and plant trees. The problem is that all these activities have been occurring before. In some locations and circumstances, investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, tree planting and other offsets are profitable, and would occur without the offset payment.

The carbon neutral industry claims to have a foolproof system to ensure that all offsets would not otherwise have occurred. But they have a conflict of interest. Independent researchers are much more circumspect. By looking at past subsidy programs that are similar to offsets, and increasingly at existing offset programs, they tend to find that while some offsets are indeed bona fide, others are not. The big message is that even more vigorous verification schemes will not solve this. It is simply impossible for third party verifiers to ever know all the internal factors that will determine the long-run profitability of a particular investment by a so-called offsetter.

This evidence is conveniently ignored by the carbon neutral industry and governments. This in itself is of interest to researchers who, like me, are trying to find out why our societies have been implementing climate policy after climate policy for almost three decades now without hitting any of our greenhouse gas reduction targets. Those who research the ability of humans to self-delude may have something to contribute.

A myth like carbon neutral would be relatively harmless if it were just something that businesses and individuals did on their own. But when adopted as official government policy, it can be harmful. In his climate policy frenzy of 2007-2008, former B.C. Liberal premier Gordon Campbell implemented some policies – like our carbon tax and our zero-emission electricity requirement – that are now recognized among the best climate policies in the world. Unfortunately, he also bought into the idea that government should be carbon neutral.

An excellent recent Sun commentary by Bob Simpson pointed out that B.C.’s policy of a carbon neutral public sector has the perverse effect of diverting our tax dollars from schools and hospitals to purchase offsets from profitable companies like EnCana in order to subsidize their investments to reduce greenhouse gases (“Taxing the public for a private good is a bad idea,” July 4). This is both economically inefficient and unfair. Unlike the rest of us, EnCana does not have to pay the carbon tax on these particular emissions. Instead, our schools and hospitals pay the $25 carbon tax for each tonne of carbon dioxide emissions and then pay an additional $25 per tonne as an offset payment to be carbon neutral, money which goes to EnCana to subsidize its emissions reductions.

Wouldn’t it be nice if your furnace was exempt from the carbon tax, and then a local hospital sent you money to upgrade to a more efficient model? That’s not likely to happen. But, hopefully, what does happen is that the B.C. government abandons the myth of carbon neutrality and gets on with the important task of pricing or regulating all emissions in the province.