Climate Progress

Since my first post dissing PG&E’s offset program, I’ve had phone calls with PG&E, NRDC, 2 calls with members of PG&E’s ClimateSmart External Advisory Group, plus a call with a forestry expert who consults with those who oversee the van Eck forest, which is featured on the “Our Projects” page of the ClimateSmart website. I have four basic conclusions:

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The “virtuous traveler” at the Toronto Star interviewed me for an article on offsetting air travel, “The winds of (climate) change.” The piece is pretty good. Here are some highlights:

Joseph Romm, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and author of Hell and High Water, is a critic of tree-planting as a carbon offset option.

“Trees take a long time to grow and they can be cut down,” he says. “I think planting and preserving trees is a good thing, but it won’t solve global warming.”

Offsets might “leave people with the impression that you can solve the climate problem by spending a few bucks,” he says. “The solution is going to take a lot of hard work for many decades.”

Still, he admits they are a step in the right direction.

“If you get well-credentialled offsets, it’s a good idea,” he says, suggesting that green-minded travellers seek out offset companies focused on clean energy projects.

The article focuses on the two offset companies that testified with me in July, Terrapass and Native Energy, both of whom seem well-credentialed. The article notes that a very high standard for offsets exists:

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Capturing CO2 and injecting it into a well to squeeze more oil out of the ground is not real carbon sequestration. Why? When the recovered oil is burned, it releases at least as much CO2 as was stored (and possibly much more). Therefore, CO2 used for such enhanced oil recovery (EOR) does not reduce net carbon emissions and should not be sold to the public as a carbon offset.

Yet a company, Blue Source, LLC, proposes to do just that, to capture the CO2 from a fertilizer plant, pipe it to an oil field, and inject it into wells for EOR :

The company hopes to profit from the project by earning credits for the carbon reductions in voluntary carbon markets and by selling carbon dioxide to energy companies.

The deal will cut CO2 from the plant by about 650,000 tonnes per year by permanently storing the emissions in the oil fields, he said. The U.S. Department of Energy says that capturing CO2 from power plants for enhanced oil recovery could greatly boost U.S. oil reserves while permanently keeping CO2 from reaching the atmosphere.

Uhh, no. To repeat, if the captured CO2 is used to extract oil that releases CO2 when it is burned, then how is that offsetting anything?

The key ratio is CO2 injected vs. CO2 released from recovered oil. Fortunately, BP and UCLA did that life-cycle analysis (subs. req’d) in 2001 and concluded, “the EOR activity is almost carbon-neutral when comparing net storage potential and gasoline emissions from the additional oil extracted.” And that may be optimistic. The study notes:

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Yes, Dole announced last week a plan to “produce and market ‘carbon neutral’ bananas and pineapples.” Their effort is “aimed at establishing a carbon neutral product supply chain for bananas and pineapples, from their production in Costa Rica to the markets in North America and Europe.”

The deal is with the National Forestry Financing Fund and Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy, so I guess we are talking tree offsets here. Well, Costa Rica is probably better than most countries at delivering real, additional benefits — and the trees will be tropical. The P.R. even has a quote from the Minister, noting that the country aims “to become the first carbon neutral country in the world by 2021.”

I guess Dole really wants to sell you bananas that are really green.

The Washington Post has a terrific front-page story on offsets. I’ve been meaning to post on renewable energy certificates (RECs) as offsets, but this article beat me to it:

Even more head-spinning [than trees as offsets] are the questions about “renewable energy certificates” from wind farms and solar plants, certifying that they made a certain amount of clean energy.

Offset companies buy these pieces of paper. Then, they use them to claim credit for pollution “avoided” — reasoning that they helped produce energy that would otherwise have come from a polluting coal or natural-gas plant.

Some of the money paid for these certificates stays with the offset vendor or with a middleman. The rest usually winds up with the energy project’s builder or the utility that buys its electricity. In some cases, this can amount to something like a donation to a for-profit company: American Electric Power, which sold an undisclosed amount of certificates from wind farms last year, earned more than $1 billion in profit.

Some environmentalists balk at this. If the certificate is bought only after the energy is produced, they wonder, how can an offset vendor know the energy wouldn’t have been produced anyway?

Consider how this plays out for one offset company, Carbonfund.org, whose Executive Director, Eric Carlson, I actually debated earlier this month:

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Yet another reason to be certain you know where your offsets are coming from. Reuters reports:

The biggest emissions-cutting projects under the Kyoto Protocol on global warming have directly contributed to an increase in the production of gases that destroy the ozone layer, a senior U.N. official says.

In addition, evidence suggests that the same projects, in developing countries, have deliberately raised their emissions of greenhouse gases only to destroy these and therefore claim more carbon credits, said Stanford University’s Michael Wara.

The whole article is worth reading since it goes into sordid detail about the counterproductive gaming of the system. In general, I am not a fan of many Clean Development Mechanism offsets, since you run into huge additionality and leakage problems.

The Gold Standard, an international standard for offsets, is wise not to allow such industrial offset projects.

We’ve had doubts. Research says we should:

Scientists at Duke University bathed plots of North Carolina pine trees in extra carbon dioxide every day for 10 years and found that while the trees grew more tissue, only the trees that received the most water and nutrients stored enough carbon dioxide to offset the effects of global warming.

Bottom line: “if a drought takes hold, trees won’t be able to do much in the way of carbon storage.”

One researcher noted, “If water availability decreases at the same time that carbon dioxide increases, then we might not have a net gain in carbon sequestration.” Well, climate change is projected to decrease water availability in many parts of the world, including the American West.

Other interesting findings:

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The British TV show Dispatches disses offsets in “The Great Green Smoke Screen” (downloadable here).

The show reports “flaws in a series of carbon offsetting schemes intended to make good the global warming gases emitted by flights and other polluting activities.” What kind of flaws?

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Offsets are spreading like kudzu:

G.E. will introduce the GE Money Earth Rewards Platinum MasterCard, which allows cardholders to forgo a 1 percent cash rebate on purchases and earmark that amount for projects that reduce greenhouse gases.

General Electric does acknowledge some of the oxymoronic irony of pushing an Earth-friendly credit card:

It’s important to keep in mind that we can’t “shop away” global climate change.

Duh! U.S. (and Chinese) greenhouse emissions are so high thanks in part to credit cards, which have allowed us to consume far beyond our means (and to consume huge amounts of products made in carbon-intensive China).

But there is more irony. As Michael J. Brune, executive director for the Rainforest Action Network, notes:

It’s ironic. G.E. supplies parts for coal-fired plants, so its credit card offsets emissions it helps create.

G.E. is not the only one offsetting consumer purchases. Check out ClimateCooler. At least they specificy what offests they will be buying:

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My mother happened to take Amtrak down to DC Friday — the day they were handing out trees to offset train travel, which is how I heard of this dubious program.

My mother received a transparent plastic cylinder containing a small Colorado Blue Spruce with the label “plant this tree and offset the carbon output from 14,000 miles of train travel.”

Yes, like the Pope, Amtrak never got the “trees are lousy offsets” memo from here or Gristmill. Fortunately, Amtrak is the energy efficient way to travel inland, and trees are great things to have — though it is a bit odd handing out the state tree of Colorado, which is native to the West, in DC.

Anyway, the plastic cylinder directs us to “Learn more @ whistlestop.Amtrak.com” where we meet “Arte the environmental engineer,” probably the lamest corporate environmental mascot ever. Arte is named for Amtrak Recognizes the Environment — yes, we all recognize the environment as it whizzes by us at 60 mph. More strangely, Arte is a typical leaf, but the Blue Spruce is an evergreen conifer.

Well, at least Amtrak isn’t handing out iron for ocean fertilization.