The birth of offsets

Back in June, I shared an email with the subject line Plants vs Fire, and had a more-than-usual response to it, mostly because of the silly example that people said made for an interesting visual.

The silly example was:

“If your bbq catches fire in the backyard, do you put it out? Or do you grab some pot plans to absorb the smoke? Silly example maybe, but this is almost literally what offsets are expected to do.”

…so then this evening, I’m reading this article in the New Yorker, and it drops the story of how carbon offsets came about:

“(in the late 1980s) …a U.S. power company named Applied Energy Services conceived a novel way to reduce emissions: it could surround its main coal-fired power station with a forest, to absorb the carbon billowing from its chimney.”

Hilarious – then:

“That plan turned out to be implausible. Scientists calculated that, to absorb the carbon the facility would pump out in its life span, the company needed to plant some fifty-two million trees—an impossibility in densely populated Connecticut.

Then an executive named Sheryl Sturges had an inspiration: since the atmosphere was a global commons, why not situate the forest elsewhere? The company eventually paid for forty thousand farmers to plant trees in the mountains of Guatemala. It cost just two million dollars—pennies per ton of carbon.

Sturges’s idea caught the world’s attention. “Antidote for a Smokestack,” a headline in Time magazine announced. A decade later, the concept of carbon offsetting was enshrined in international law, as thirty-seven industrialized nations and the European Union agreed to emissions-reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol.”

Offsets have been marketed so irresponsibly, it’s mind-blowing that the concept was ever approved–by the UN no less.

Absolutely zero against more forests and profits from offset programs going to the locals (a core principal of offsetting, assuming it actually happens), but the effort > impact ratio is just so flipping low.

Bigger effort > impact ratios here.

Btw, timeline:

• Late 80s: Surround power station with forest idea conceived
• 30+ years later: Plants vs Fire email
• 3 months later: New Yorker article.

I’m claiming Inception with this one 😉