I’m just back from a trip to the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Portland, Oregon. On the way my partner and I stopped off for a few days chez Maria in LA (and a very good time we had too). But all this scholarship, tourism and partying comes at a price, of course. I’ve flown a very long way indeed (and I know many of my fellow bloggers also clock up extensive miles). So what to do about all that carbon I’ve just burnt? One option would be to pay into a carbon offsetting scheme, but I’ve become convinced that many of them are either not very good, or are simply scams. There may be some good ones (commenters please …) but I’m sure I can’t tell which are worth supporting. So here’s another idea: I could just buy energy saving light bulbs and give them away to friends, students, neighbours, thereby generating sufficient carbon savings to purge my sin. But how many (at what rating) would I have to buy and give away per hundred or thousand airmiles?
{ 56 comments }
John Quiggin 03.31.08 at 12:23 am
I use offset providers accredited by the New South Wales Government Greenhouse Gas Abatement scheme. It’s a state scheme introduced because the late unlamented Howard government refused to do anything.
I don’t think the measurement issues are fully resolved, but they do a reasonable job. Since this is a global issue there’s no reason for people in the UK not to use them.
Of course, the whole thing will change once air travel is included in emissions targets and the costs are included in ticket prices.
Meanwhile, my approach is to reduce air travel when I can and offset it when I can’t.
Joshua W. Burton 03.31.08 at 12:52 am
A thousand airmiles in a full plane should be about two hundred liters of jet fuel, or 7 GJ, or 2 MWh, or 25 watts saved 24/7 for a year.
Idiot/Savant 03.31.08 at 12:59 am
CarbonZero. Their credits are actual Kyoto AAU from New Zealand’s allocation (the NZ government having a couple of schemes to hand it out to people who build windfarms and plant trees), so it is rock solid.
DB 03.31.08 at 1:16 am
Energy efficient lightbulbs can be a little expensive, and perhaps outside the budgets of some. How about creating an offset fund that would subsidize such greener household items to increase lower income household access to them? This would extend the impact beyond circles of friends and colleagues.
Joshua W. Burton 03.31.08 at 1:28 am
Unfortunately, there’s also a dilution effect to consider, as you follow your dollar’s expanding ripples into the economy. Will the stockholders and employees of GE (or Jinhui Lighting etc.) turn around and spend your marginal dollar in an ecologically responsible way, or will they revert it toward the median $/KW ratio of the economy as a whole?
A safer approach might be to offset your carbon consumption by reducing other discretionary spending and thereby shrinking the world economy directly. Buy postage stamps and leave them out in the rain, or refrain from cashing your fiscal stimulus check this spring. Think of the marginal worker you’re laying off as a “tenure offset,” if you like, and when he stays home to read want ads, the invisible hand gives us your energy offset for free.
Sortition 03.31.08 at 1:29 am
How about actually reducing your globe-trotting rather than trying to get others to offset your carbon addiction? Is that just too extreme to consider?
m 03.31.08 at 2:16 am
@db #4. Energry efficient lightbulbs pay for themselves after one month of normal use and save households money from there on out.
Let’s say your friends live in cold countries, then buying them compact flourescent lightbulbs wouldn’t save any energy since the inefficenies of incandescent bulbs is effectively zero as their surplus heat generation offsets heating costs.
The Ontario Power Authority gives rebates for CFL. My guess is people are just too lazy to change the bulbs. So maybe we need a programe where people change the bulbs for you and collect your energy savings for the first year.
CFL’s use 20-25% of the energy of a normal light bulb. So one 100watt lightbulb for 4 hours a day is 0.1kW/day saved.
On top of that burning jet fuel is less efficent then however your local power genco generates power so knock it down a bit more for amount of carbon saved…
xodusprime 03.31.08 at 2:17 am
according to: eartheasy
“Replacing a single incandescent bulb with a CFL will keep a half-ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere over the life of the bulb…”
and on: terrapass
I did a calculation from LAX to RTP, which came out as 4464mi : 1741 lbs CO2
Reduced down is 390 lbs CO2/ 1000 mi.
With a ton being 2240lbs, a single bulb saves 1120 lbs of emissions over its lifetime. So, for each bulb you give away, you’re free to travel 2,870 miles.
Chris Bertram 03.31.08 at 6:16 am
Here’s a comment that was mailed to me when our comment system was malfunctioning:
1. If you really want to reduce emissions, buy allowances in a cap-and-trade scheme and keep them away from the market. This definitely reduces the corresponding amount of emissions. The fact that most offsetting companies don’t do this is as sure a sign as any that they’re likely to be if not scams at least insufficiently concerned with whether the reductions they achieve are “additional” to a counterfactual scenario where they do nothing.
2. If you want estimates of the carbon savings associated with installing energy saving lightbulbs the place to go is the “illustrative mix” of the UK Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (the main policy for the improvement of household energy efficiency). This is based on a model of energy use in the UK housing market operated by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) and likely to get as good as it gets. You’ll find some documentation here, and can see that a compact flourescent lightbulb saves around 8 kg of CO2 per year. With a CFL lifetime of 17.7 years, you get savings of 0.14 tCO2. So, buy 14 bulbs to offset the roughly 2 tCO2 emissions of a return flight between UK and LA
The BRE model that calculates this tries to account for things like the “rebound” effect (people will leave lights on more when they are more efficient) but you’ll nonetheless have to ask yourself the questions that attach to offsetting schemes: how “additional” will these savings be? Won’t your friends buy such lightbulbs anyway, especially as there is a substantial chance that standard incandscent lightbulbs anyway will be banned in the next few years? Or, turning it all round: did your flying actually contribute to emissions in a meaningful sense? Your flight would anyway have flown and your additional weight added next to nothing to emissions.
3. To give my personal view of this, neither 1. or 2. seems like a particularly useful idea. I’m all for emissions trading, and I don’t buy the daft “indulgences” critique of offsetting. But any offsetting achieved by individuals can only ever be symbolic in the context of global warming. And, if you want to make a symbolic gesture, or perhaps signal commitment to policymakers, a more effective way surely would be to spend the same money on an environmental organisation that lobbies for emissions reductions. You won’t have a feel-good, quantitative amount of emissions reductions to attach to your action, but then that’s mostly just illusory anyway.
This is a political point as much as an economic one. Global warming is a gigantic commons problem and will only ever be addressed effectively through mandatory measures enacted and enforced by the state. Indeed, this is one of the reasons we have states. Participating in the democratic process seems like a much more fruitful thing to do than to try and run one’s own sideshow.
Danny Shahar 03.31.08 at 6:45 am
Like all fluorescent light bulbs, those energy saving bulbs contain mercury. So if you’re going to hand them out to your friends, you might want to let them know about recycling them and taking care to properly clean up broken bulbs.
But if you’re going to try to singlehandedly offset your CO2 emissions, you’ll probably want a more diversified strategy than just buying light bulbs. You could start by eating less meat, especially beef. A huge proportion of the world’s farmland is dedicated to growing crops to feed livestock. With all the energy taken to operate the farms, transport and process the grain, transport and process the meat, etc., meat turns out to be a relatively CO2 intensive product. And don’t forget, cows are a very significant source of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.
On a similar theme, you might also consider buying more of the stuff you need at stores which carry locally-produced merchandise. Transporting stuff halfway around the world produces a lot of CO2, and by buying local goods, you could cut a lot of that out. Plus, you would be helping to strengthen your surrounding communities by rewarding them monetarily simply for being close to you.
There are a plethora of different ways to lessen your CO2 footprint, but to be realistic, it’s unlikely that you could make the kind of changes necessary to absolve you of culpability for climate change without seriously changing your lifestyle. A large reason for that is that you’d be trying to do so in the context of a market which is designed to supply consumers who don’t care about their contributions to climate change. So I wish you the best of luck, but I wonder if perhaps the effort you seem prepared to expend would not do more to prevent climate change if it were devoted to encouraging fundamental changes in our society.
But in the mean time, make some of the changes which actually reflect what you’d like to be doing even if climate change weren’t a problem. Eating more plants and less animals is healthy; buying more locally-produced goods is something we can all rally behind. The same goes for using more energy-efficient equipment when it makes sense to, ensuring that your house is well insulated, and countless other things you know you’d like to be doing anyway, but which help mitigate CO2 emissions on some level. Good luck!
Matthew Kuzma 03.31.08 at 7:09 am
#7, I hadn’t thought about the heating use of incandescent bulbs, but keep in mind that your statement is only true when people are heating their homes. I live in a pretty cold climate, but we still have our heat off 4 months of the year and during that time CFLs are reducing carbon emissions.
I’d also be curious to see how much less AC a home (say in Phoenix Arizona) full of CFLs uses as compared to a home full of incandescent bulbs.
mr. steven crane 03.31.08 at 7:23 am
wouldn’t a ban of incandescent bulbs completely kill off lava lamps?
bad Jim 03.31.08 at 7:59 am
Whenever I’m in a belligerent state of mind I’d recommend blowing up oil pipelines or transmission towers. Sure, it’s a short term fix, but damned effective and it shows you mean business.
I turned the off the lights and the CRT’s between 8 and 9 the other night and listened to Dvorak on the stereo with only battery-powered LED lanterns for illumination. My neighbors didn’t.
You can’t get from here to there by sinning less.
Chris Bertram 03.31.08 at 8:43 am
Just a quick reaction to #9, 10.
Lots of interesting points, but both of you draw the contrast between individual action and political action.
We’ve been here before, lots of times.
I just don’t see the force of the constrast you’re invoking. Sure, political action is necessary to effect change, whether that change has to do with climate or the distribution of resources. But it hardly follows from that that individuals shouldn’t also make individual and non-mandatory contributions. It isn’t as if I’m suggesting that individual action should be a _substitute for_ political action or for legally binding measures.
Adam Roberts 03.31.08 at 9:46 am
#6 has it. The problem with carbon offsetting is not in any particular scheme but rather the mindset it fosters, viz. “the idea of changing my lifestyle, for instance by curtailing or eliminating the selfish pleasures international travel affords me, is of course out of the question. What’s needed instead is something that will assuage any pricks to my conscience, and enable me to carry on living precisely as I have done before.’
A couple of years ago I was having lunch with my colleagues, and we were chatting about what we’d done over the Easter break. One said: ‘I flew to LA.’ Why? ‘I had some free time, and I’d never been, and I was curious, and the tickets really aren’t expensive’. What interested me was the reaction of everybody else around the table (everyone but me, I mean). They all went; ‘great! well done you! Did you enjoy yourself? Excellent!’ Which is to say, it was seen as something virtuous in this individual that they’d got off their arse and done something with their Easter break. But the exact opposite is true, I’d say: they’d damaged the planet for no real reason at all beyond indulging themselves. Or to put it another way: when this person talks to their grandchildren in fifty years time and faces the question: ‘why did you take this flight, given that it contributed to fucking up the planet?’ and they have to answer truthfully ‘on a whim‘ it’ll look very bad.
Tim Worstall 03.31.08 at 10:03 am
How about a truly odd idea?
Taking the Stern Review numbers your 2 tonnes of CO2 created damages of $170.
So why not donate $170 to an organisation designing the technologies which will reduce future emissions?
From your own (or at least a local) university perhaps?
http://www.bris.ac.uk/research/news/2007/120307
“NanoDiamond, developed by Dr Neil Fox, Dr Gareth Fuge and Dr Suzanne Furkert, three postgraduate researchers at the University of Bristol also made the competition short list. NanoDiamond is a new type of solar cell that will be cheaper and more efficient than ones currently available. The new material has the potential to form thin flexible solar panels that will have many potential applications that are beyond the scope of standard silicon based solar panels.”
I realise that not all that many people are going to be fascinated by getting 85 odd quid as a contribution to their development expenses,but something like that does seem to offer the best multiplier for your money.
abb1 03.31.08 at 10:04 am
Sixteen.
Peter Erwin 03.31.08 at 10:30 am
#10: The problem with “buying locally” is that you cannot assume that locally produced items are always less carbon-emissive than imported items. In particular, as this article points out, locally produced food (in Western countries) is often produced using heated greenhouses, fertilizer, tractors, refrigerated storage, etc. In certain cases, this can mean more total emissions than food shipped from a country where less energy-intensive and carbon-emissive methods are used — even including the carbon emitted by air transport from the country of origin.
(One of the more counter-intuitive examples in that article: Apples produced in the UK are harvested in September and October, and then refrigerated. By late summer, the carbon cost of the refrigeration exceeds that of shipping fresher apples from New Zealand. “It is therefore better for the environment if UK shoppers buy apples from New Zealand in July and August rather than those of British origin.”)
Brett Bellmore 03.31.08 at 10:39 am
“but keep in mind that your statement is only true when people are heating their homes.”
Speaking as one of those people who live in a cold climate, it’s a nifty coincidence that during the part of the year we aren’t heating the house, the days are really long, so we aren’t much lighting it either.
sanbikinoraion 03.31.08 at 11:44 am
#10 on meat and #16 on future tech are the way to go IMHO.
Great Zamfir 03.31.08 at 11:59 am
A short point on the suppposed uselessness of CFLs in cold climates: this is only true if you are heating your house with electricity.
Heating your house with incandescent light bulbs means a lot (two-thirds or so) of energy is lost in the production and transport of the electricity, and switching to CFLs means you are now directly burning gas for heat, instead of burning gas to make electricity to feed your lamps to heat your house.
If you are heating your house with electricity: don’t bother about your lighting. Bother about the electric heating.
Maynard Handley 03.31.08 at 1:15 pm
Here’s an even better idea. Get a vasectomy, and tell everyone you know to get one also.
Or, alternatively, you can engage in stupid pointless posturing, like Earth Hour, while the problem inexorably grows as the population grows.
CK Dexter 03.31.08 at 1:42 pm
I’m really very surprised when so many intelligent people take the moralistic approach to environmental responsibility seriously–not because I’m absolutely sure we should not do so, but because it seems far from obvious that we should.
Maybe I’m missing something, but given the grievousness of our environmental situation (and echoing some of Chris Bertram’s points), I suspect the good intentions of a small fraction of people with the luxury and motivation to modify their lifestyles in what are–in the big picture–statistically insignificant ways, amounts to nothing of real practical value.
Again, given the grievousness of our situation in which slight improvements, while technically improvements, are not of any practical value (the difference between reaching an irreversible, unmanageable crisis in 100 years and 1 day rather than in 100 years).
I even worry that it may be counter-productive, since the principle motive–and effect–is to give to that small, non-indifferent segment of the population a clean conscience, perhaps making them less likely to actively engage in more effective state solutions, almost certainly alienating the rest of the less “righteous” population, thus making them resent and oppose useful political measures.
In which case, it might indeed follow “that individuals shouldn’t also make individual and non-mandatory contributions.” Or it may simply follow that individual have no moral obligation to do so. The language of “sin,” “vice,” and “virtue,” though used somewhat facetiously by environmental moralists, only further increases my suspicion that their predominant motive is to keep their own consciouses clean and affirm their own self-worth through ascetic moral superiority to a fictionalized “evil” contrasting other.
bernarda 03.31.08 at 1:46 pm
If you are really concerned, the first thing to do is TURN OFF your air conditioning, both at home and in the car.
http://www.alternet.org/story/37882/
“Almost one kilowatt-hour of electricity out of every five consumed in the United States in a full year goes to cooling buildings. Much of the nation’s excess power-generating capacity, which sits idle until needed to satisfy quick spikes in demand, has had to be built because of air-conditioning.”
– Also, politically air conditioning has probably favored reactionary Rethublicans in elections to Congress and President.
http://www.alternet.org/story/38154/
“Seats in the House of Representatives and electoral votes in presidential elections are re-allocated after each decade’s census according to the relative populations of the states. In 1950, the 14 New England and Rust Belt states were apportioned 197 members in the House of Representatives, while the 13 Sun Belt states had only 96. Fifty years later, the northern states’ membership had dwindled to 147, and that of the southern group had swelled to 132.
That net gain of 86 House seats by the Sun Belt over the more liberal group of northern states has had profound consequences. Of those northern states’ current 175 seats in Congress (including both the House and Senate), 83 belong to Republicans, 90 to Democrats, and 2 to independents who vote mostly with the Democrats. The 13 Sun Belt states are represented by 106 Republicans and only 50 Democrats.”
Remember, when you turn on your air conditioning, you are helping to elect reactionaries.
Picador 03.31.08 at 2:40 pm
#23:
Absolutely right, and it reveals an ignorance of the concept of elastic demand. My reduction lowers the price of having more kids, of driving bigger trucks, of buying more Chinese doo-dads from Wal-Mart. Americans haven’t yet topped out their ability to consume more in any of these categories, and the Chinese and Indians have barely gotten started. So any market, as opposed to government, approach to these problems seems prima facie useless.
The “sin” language is, as you say, illustrative of what’s really going on here. My partner and I attended an “eco-wedding show” in Toronto a few weeks ago, and it was a real eye-opener w.r.t. the moral depravity of the eco-capitalist scam. Most of the companies on display simply had shallow and incoherent justifications for claiming to be environmentally conscious (hemp gift bags anyone?), but at least one seemed to be committing pretty blatant securities and/or consumer fraud. This was a company selling “carbon offsets” for weddings: they helpfully explained that they would calculate the carbon produced by the wedding and tell you how much you had to pay them for a clean conscience. When pressed for details on what they did with this money, they tried to change the subject, then had to fetch a supervisor, who eventually admitted that they were a privately-held corporation who took the money and invested it in “sustainable energy technologies”, keeping the returns on this investment for themselves. In other words, it was like a socially responsible mutual fund where the fund managers hold on to your stock certificates for you.
This was apparently a question they had not yet been asked that day. The reason seems obvious: people are buying indulgences, and the destination of that money is irrelevant to its effect of granting absolution to the donor.
At least the medieval Catholic Church managed to feed the odd beggar now and again; these eco-capitalists don’t seem to have accomplished even that with the money flooding into their little schemes.
Jaybird 03.31.08 at 2:51 pm
My immediate response to seeing the lightbulbs suggestion was to think that the most important part of the interaction was the communication of virtue.
“Yes, I made a lot of carbon, BUT I’M STILL A GOOD PERSON!!!! Here’s a lightbulb.”
Instead of that, may I suggest going to heifer.org and buying some “good carbon” offsets? Yes, you’ve created “bad carbon”… but the way to offset that is not to give a first-world person a better lightbulb. Give a third or fourth world person some carbon that will make their life better. Buy a goat. Buy some bunnies.
If it’s important to you that your virtue is still communicated to your friends, hit your friends up for $20 and everybody can buy a share of a milk menagerie.
Don’t pretend that your carbon can be offset by a lightbulb. It can’t.
But it can be offset by good carbon.
Uncle Kvetch 03.31.08 at 3:39 pm
Well, we’ve booked a vacation in the UK for this spring, and in buying the tickets online from British Airways I noticed that I had the option of buying carbon offsets to “cover” the trips. Which I duly did, only now I’m encountering stories like this.
Thing is, I can’t tell if the problem with the BA offset program is that the money isn’t being put to good use, or that BA isn’t marketing the program aggressively enough to get a sufficient number of passengers to take part. Anyway, I’d be very interested to know what the folks who follow these things more closely think about the whole airline offset issue.
engels 03.31.08 at 4:24 pm
the daft “indulgences†critique of offsetting
I’m not sure what this refers to, but I can think of a few reasons for having moral reservations about offsetting which aren’t completely daft:
i) it sends the message that if you are rich you can still do whatever the hell you like (provided you cough up some loose change) and this may well weaken society-wide feelings of solidarity which are needed to confront the problem collectively
ii) a possible ‘Gift Relationship’ dynamic whereby once people get used to the idea of paying for emissions their motivation to voluntarily reduce them for moral reasons is reduced
iii) it might be that when facing a collective threat of a certain gravity it is not morally acceptable for richer members of society to avoid making their share of the necessary sacrifices by paying poorer ones to make them in their place (cf. conscription, or perhaps more appropriately rationing in war time, which might not be too strained a comparison in view of (a) the seriousness of the threat faced and (b) the level of sacrifices which will be required)…
a very public sociologist 03.31.08 at 6:09 pm
Sortition is dead right. I get by without trotting all over the globe for conferences, why can’t anyone else?
As an added bonus, it affords me the opportunity to look down my nose at my green colleagues, none of whom see the contradiction between preaching environmentally consumption and flying off to gatherings in Australia.
mds 03.31.08 at 7:18 pm
As an added bonus, it affords me the opportunity to look down my nose at my green colleagues, none of whom see the contradiction between preaching environmentally consumption and flying off to gatherings in Australia.
Amen. Indeed, I will only attend conferences / visit sick family members / etc. if they are within bicycling distance. Anything else would be hypocritical.
q 04.01.08 at 1:55 am
So it seems the answer is either, a) it depends or b) you asked the wrong question, you meant what’s the best way to reduce CO2 emmissions, the answer to that question is: it depends.
Avery 04.01.08 at 3:32 am
The carbon offsets debate has now become like the Israel-Palestine debate. Ask one simple question and suddenly everyone starts accusing everyone else of being a Nazi.
The basic problem with all gradualist responses to climate change (such as “reduce what you can, offset what you can’t, and each year, reduce a bit more”) is that they are gradualist responses to an extreme emergency.
The basic problem with all individual responses to climate change is that they are infinitesimal responses to a global problem.
The basic problem with all pay-to-pollute responses is that they allow rich people or rich countries to continue as they were, at a cost. (This is as true of carbon taxes as of carbon offsets.)
And yet, and yet. What are we to do? In order to keep climate change below 2 degrees C we probably need immediate major changes in the lifestyle of virtually everyone in the wealthy countries. But if we get all moralistic and reject anything less than the extremism of #22, #29, and #30–extremism which is likely not especially effective anyway, and perhaps even counterproductive, for reasons noted by #25–we are likely to alienate almost everyone, divide the environmental movement, and increase thereby the likelihood of climate change above 3, 4, or 5 degrees or more.
It seems sensible to subscribe to the following strategy, in this order:
1. Work doggedly for political, economic, and other collective action to significantly and quickly reduce the carbon emissions of the rich countries while providing leapfrog technologies to poor countries.
2. As much as you can (and this is an elastic notion), reduce personal and collective emissions in ways that, as best you can discern, really do decrease total global emissions, even if by small amounts.
3. Help others do 1 and 2. If offsets are part of this — e.g. offsets that buy other people solar arrays or CFLs or LEDs to replace wood fuel or incandescents — so be it. It’s a good thing, not a bad thing. Further, if the idea of offsetting your own emissions helps you to set a target the way tithing helps you set a target for charitable contributions, so be it.
If strategies 1 and 2 conflict–say, you need to drive in order to camp out under the runway at Heathrow–choose 1 and drive. If you have to fly to Bali to throw egg on the face of the US delegation, fly to Bali.
Of course, some offsets are better than others. David Suzuki endorses the “gold standard”, which pays close attention to the issue of additionality. (This is a real issue. But the idea that it has not been addressed and that all offsets are therefore a scam is wrong.) Another respected certification program is green-e.
You can buy your friends CFLs, but as an instance of strategy 3 this seems like icing on the cake; there needs to be a cake there. David Suzuki’s website not only lists some useful carbon calculators but also lists recommended offset retailers. And lots of other things you can do. Probably, you’re doing some of them already.
Sortition 04.01.08 at 5:41 am
All this is nice and well, but if you do these things while your personal CO2 emissions (made for personal purposes rather than when performing an important pubic service) are atypically high (as they would be if you are flying around more than a few thousand miles a year), then you are simply a living contradiction and any statements you make about being environmentally responsible cannot be taken seriously.
Maynard Handley 04.01.08 at 7:29 am
Great. So the suggestion of “get a vasectomy” is considered extremism? This is why we are all freaking doomed.
If we want to go all philosophical here (this is, after all, CT), what exactly is the goal we are after here? Is the goal
(1) a bare level of subsistence for a massive number of people (ie the state of humanity through most of nature, and the state of most of humanity today) OR
(2) a world in which some of us can live like kings, including such indulgences as arguing about philosophy and justice on the internet OR
(3) a world in which we can *all* live like kings?
Because if you are not aggressively pushing every single measure that reduces human population, the only question is which is it of (1) or (2) that you support?
I personally support (3), but I have to tell you that I have precious little hope of it coming about, regardless of my attempts, not least because of the inexorable irrationality one sees, even in fora like this supposedly populated by the best and the brightest.
Or, to take a different tack, we have people above like engels telling us that we all have to suffer to get things to improve. Excuse me? So if *I* do the responsible thing and have no kids, and you do the moronic thing and have twelve kids, we both have to suffer equally?
Phrasing things this way is PRECISELY the issue, not a minor diversion. The question is “who should suffer”? And it’s a fine thing to say that the West should suffer because they emitted the past carbon, but it is just as legitimate, if we are going to go forward, to say something like
“Carbon allocations per nation should be frozen at something like the population levels of 1950, NOT the population levels of 2007, because countries should not be rewarded for having engaged in clearly antisocial behavior”.
engels 04.01.08 at 9:30 am
Maynard, I’m sorry but I’m having trouble seeing any connection between your rant and anything I wrote.
engels 04.01.08 at 9:36 am
Maynard – To be a little more explicit:
(i) I simply did not make the claim that appears to have so enraged you (“we all have to suffer to get things to improve”)…
(ii) The views you set out in response to this claim, regarding the alleged evils of procreation, seem too nutty to merit a response.
engels 04.01.08 at 9:38 am
(quoted claim s/b: we all “have to suffer equally”)
Praisegod Barebones 04.01.08 at 11:02 am
‘How about actually reducing your globe-trotting rather than trying to get others to offset your carbon addiction? Is that just too extreme to consider?’
And heaven forbid you meet and marry someone from a foreign country, and then decide – say – that you’d like to attend your sister’s wedding or see her children every few years or so.
That kind of indulgence makes you a ‘living contradiction’, and means that nothing you say can be taken seriously.
Yay for fora like Crooked Timber where we can all moralise to our heart’s content in a suitably environmentally approved manner.
(Oh – and what kind of power source are your computer, and the servers which keep this blog going running on? Because if its not solar-power or hamsters, I’m not sure why I should take your opinion seriously either.)
engels 04.01.08 at 11:33 am
Avery – I’m broadly in agreement with your prioritisation of (1) political action then (2) personal reduction then (3) mitigation (eg. offsetting). I’d suggest that despite your conviction that everyone commenting here apart from you is an ‘extremist’ idiot it is fairly widely shared eg. John Quiggin made a similar point in the first comment on this thread.
However, there are genuine moral concerns (not merely ‘moralistic’ ones) surrounding carbon offsetting programmes, some of which I tried to outline in my earlier comment. Your comment does not address these but merely ignores them.
Adam Roberts 04.01.08 at 12:30 pm
38: ‘That kind of indulgence makes you a “living contradiction”, and means that nothing you say can be taken seriously.’
I suppose you think you’re bring ironic; but acutally this is a statement of straightforward fact. It really isn’t too much to say, sort your priorities: personal convenience/indulgence, or the planet?
I’m with a v. public sociologist:
29: I get by without trotting all over the globe for conferences, why can’t anyone else? As an added bonus, it affords me the opportunity to look down my nose at my green colleagues, none of whom see the contradiction between preaching environmentally consumption and flying off to gatherings in Australia.
I also get by without trotting all over the globe. Plus, I can’t remember which UK comedian it was who said, of New Zealand: ‘thirteen hours of connecting flights, and I end up in Scotland? No thank you.’
Maynard Handley 04.01.08 at 12:31 pm
engels you say:
” it sends the message that if you are rich you can still do whatever the hell you like (provided you cough up some loose change)”
which is, as far as I can tell, a message that we should all suffer equally.
My rant, as you put it, is basically saying “screw you” to that idea. If you insist that we all have to suffer equally, both people like myself who have done the single most aggressive thing possible to solve this problem, and the breeders with their twelve kids, well then, sorry, but I’m not interested in being part of your crusade — and I use the word crusade deliberately, because if you are not willing to accept, as part of the resolution of this problem, that some people are a whole lot more responsible for the problem than others, well you’re operating in some strange religious sphere that I can’t relate to.
engels 04.01.08 at 1:16 pm
Maynard – I do accept that ‘some people are a whole lot more responsible for the problem than others’. For example, as a resident of the US, which emits 20 tons of CO2 per capita per annum on average, you are a whole lot more responsible for it than the vast majority of other people in the world, whether or not you, or they, have children, and especially if they live in developing countries, many of which emit less than one hundredth of that figure.
SamChevre 04.01.08 at 1:33 pm
My recommendation (if global warming specifically is the concern) is to give the money to one of the pro-nuclear lobbies.
Something like 2/3 of CO2 emissions are from coal-burning, largely for electric power; all that (say half of current CO2 emissions, and a larger proportion of future ones) could be replaced by nuclear, which is less environmentally damaging than coal AND doesn’t contribute CO2.
mds 04.01.08 at 1:41 pm
which is less environmentally damaging than coal, AND doesn’t contribute CO2.
Indeed, since uranium is wafted effortlessly from the ground by energy fairies.
Great Zamfir 04.01.08 at 2:32 pm
Engels, Maynard is completely right. Not having children saves 2 children, 4 grandchildren, etc. After 6 generations, the combined offspring of an African peasant will have produced more CO2 than an average American. Before the year 3000, every African will have over a 1000 billion offspring. And if Maynard were to have kids, there would have been 1000 billion Americans on top of that! That would certainly wreck the planet! And Maynard has saved us from this fate.
engels 04.01.08 at 2:56 pm
Maybe we could combine Maynard’s line of thinking with Sam Chevre’s. Donate the money in question to the nuclear weapons lobby. This could increase the likelihood of a global nuclear war which would wipe out the entire human race, making anthropogenic climate change a thing of the past. Result!
SamChevre 04.01.08 at 3:10 pm
mds,
I didn’t say “not environmentally damaging”; if I had, your comment would make sense.
If I’m wrong–if per unit of energy output French-style nuclear power is environmentally worse than American-style coal power–I would like a reference so I can revise my information.
engels 04.01.08 at 3:19 pm
I didn’t say “not environmentally damagingâ€
No, you said “nuclear… doesn’t contribute CO2”.
engels 04.01.08 at 3:29 pm
Nuclear reactors don’t produce CO2. Nuclear power produces CO2 in the process of mining, extraction, etc which I believe has been estimated as a third of that produced in the equivalent process by gas-fired power stations.
Whether or not nuclear power is ‘environmentally worse’ than other forms of power, when one considers all the possible consequences including very long term ones and certain low-probability but catastrophic outcomes, is a pretty complex judgment, not a piece of ‘information’…
engels 04.01.08 at 4:04 pm
a third of that produced in the equivalent process
(…by which, I should have said, I meant the complete production process from extraction to refining to energy production. I don’t know how reliable this estimate is, but it is certainly false to say, as in #43, that ‘nuclear… doesn’t produce CO2’.)
SamChevre 04.01.08 at 4:23 pm
OK, I’ll restate and hope everyone is happy this time.
Both producing coal, and producing enriched uranium, cause environmental damage and require energy (hence, in the world of the present, cause CO2 emissions). It seems unlikely that the damage is as great for uranium as it is for coal, especially with fuel reprocessing.
Creating electricity from coal creates MASSIVE amounts of CO2–around half of total global CO2 output IIRC. Creating electricity from uranium does not produce CO2.
And producing power from natural gas is a distraction; there is not nearly enough natural gas available where it’s needed, and it is too hard to transport, to replace coal as baseload power.
engels 04.01.08 at 4:40 pm
Well that’s not too bad for a second attempt but it still doesn’t get you anywhere near your original–mildly trollish–claim that the most efficient way to carbon offset is to make a donation to the nuclear lobby.
Sortition 04.01.08 at 5:58 pm
Presently, if you budget your emissions carefully, making a transcontinental trip “every few years” will not necessarily put you in the atypically high emitters category. (This may change if other forms of energy consumption become cleaner and air travel does not.)
My computer and monitor together use about 250 Watts. My portion in the power consumption of the servers handling my traffic is probably much lower. Let’s say a total of 300 Watts for every moment I moralize on Crooked Timber. Every passenger-mile on an airplane consumes about 1KWh. This means that a 7000 mile trip (round trip NY to London) is equivalent to about 23,000 moralizing-hours, or about 30 years in which I moralize for 2 hours a day, seven days a week (which is an amount of moralizing that even I would find hard to sustain).
Maynard Handley 04.02.08 at 5:43 am
“Maynard – I do accept that ‘some people are a whole lot more responsible for the problem than others’. For example, as a resident of the US, which emits 20 tons of CO2 per capita per annum on average, you are a whole lot more responsible for it than the vast majority of other people in the world, whether or not you, or they, have children, and especially if they live in developing countries, many of which emit less than one hundredth of that figure.
”
So, engels, you still did not answer my question in 34.
Is your goal a world in which we are *all* poor as heck, or only those developing nations?
By phrasing things the way you have you obviously are quite content to leave them wallowing in their misery.
I, on the other hand, aspire for something better for them. And yet, I’m the bad guy?
Or, to put it differently, we’re already having massive problems with the Chinese and Indians clawing their way up from “unrelieved misery” to “mostly crappy”. How do you propose that we move them further up the ladder, along with everyone in Africa, while the Earth’s population simply stays stable, let alone grows every year?
engels 04.02.08 at 1:09 pm
So, engels, you still did not answer my question in 34.
Is your goal a world in which we are all poor as heck, or only those developing nations?
By phrasing things the way you have you obviously are quite content to leave them wallowing in their misery.
Wtf?
engels 04.02.08 at 2:27 pm
How do you propose that we move them further up the ladder, along with everyone in Africa, while the Earth’s population simply stays stable, let alone grows every year?
Umm, by us in the rich world changing our personal and collective patterns of behaviour to environmentally responsible ones perhaps? I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work…
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