Suscribing

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What would Martin Luther think?

Last month the Catholic Church announced the return of plenary indulgences. They need not have. Environmentalists have already claimed the privilege of putting a price on guilt for this century. The new Catholic indulgences will have to take a back seat to carbon credits when it comes to buying your way out of sin.

To be fair, the Catholics will no longer allow you to buy your way out of Hell. They no longer sell indulgences, rather the indulgences can only be granted for doing things that good Catholics should be doing anyway. It is too bad that some environmentalists are not following their example but, instead, insist upon following in the footsteps of the 15th century Catholics and are selling redemption for cash.

For environmentalists, redemption comes in the form of carbon offsets; forgiveness for their role in global warming. For anyone who does not know what a carbon offset is, the essential idea is that companies, or individuals, engage in activities that have a net negative impact on CO2 emissions – planting trees, installing carbon sequestration devices in factories, using renewable power sources rather than traditional power sources, etc – and then calculate the amount of CO2 they have taken out of the atmosphere and sell the right to release that much CO2 to someone who has not reduced their carbon output. The going rate in European markets in 2007 was between 21† and 24† for a pound of emitted CO2.

It has become increasingly popular for those celebrities who wish to appear environmentally friendly to publicly buy these credits to “offset” the carbon expended in their daily lives. Once they have purchased their credits they can blithely jet from their manses in Italy all over the world: confident that they are doing their part to protect the environment.

This confidence in their environmental credentials is the flaw in the carbon credit argument. While, unlike indulgences in past centuries, some carbon credits can actually repair past “sins” by removing carbon from the atmosphere the mechanism by which this occurs is not well understood. This means that the degree to which planting a tree actually offsets carbon is not entirely clear. Furthermore, the regulatory schemes which determine what constitutes a carbon credit, and who can and cannot sell them, are not well defined or sufficiently advanced to ensure that the markets are secure and non-fraudulent. Essentially, there is no way of knowing whether or not those carbon credits purchased to forgive air travel actually equal the amount of carbon that the flight released.

There is, however, an even more fundamental flaw with the practice of offsetting carbon emissions through carbon credits. Like indulgences carbon credits are a forgiveness of “sin” that absolves the sinner of guilt for having committed an action. Whether or not someone should feel guilty for these actions is irrelevant, the essential fact is that, if they are purchasing a carbon credit, they clearly feel guilty for taking that action. By purchasing the carbon credit they therefore, in their minds, absolve themselves of the guilt incurred by releasing carbon into the atmosphere. It is this absolution that creates the fundamental problem with credits.

So long as credits do not directly reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere – and to some extent even when they do – there is problem with absolving this guilt. The problem is that guilt provides an enormous incentive to change behavior (Irish Catholics have known this for a very long time and anyone with an Irish Catholic mother can attest to their reliance on this knowledge). By absolving this guilt through the purchase of carbon credits the incentive to change behavior is removed. Rather than make the difficult decision to fundamentally change their behavior people can simply purchase credits to make what they would have done anyway “environmentally friendly.”

Yet, drastic and fundamental change is absolutely necessary. Offsetting carbon emissions will not stop global Warming. It will require a wholesale re-organization of the way which society, especially American society, conducts itself (for a better explanation of this see here). Providing the option of carbon credits simply promotes the myth that business as usual can continue and the environment will be fine.

Even if carbon credits actually do reduce the CO2- levels in the atmosphere, they still provide no incentive to change behavior. It is not possible, or desirable, to simply remove all of the CO2 from the atmosphere and as a result some type of change is still necessary.

While there is a place for a well-ordered carbon credit market, especially as a means of reducing industrial pollution, the presence of a personal market for carbon offsets is not a long-term solution. Rather than encouraging the purchase of these credits, environmentalists would be better served by following the model of the Catholic church and handing out credits to those who car pool, who bike or who minimize flights. In short, those who do what good environmentalists should do anyway.

Money and Parks

America is unique in the way that it protects its natural heritage. The National Park System is the oldest and the largest in the world. The tradition of publicly protected land in the United States dates to the preservation of this city’s very own Boston Common in 1634. The first modern national park was created in 1872 when President Grant signed it into existence. This has grown into a system of parks that now preserves 79 million acres of American land and some of its most important heritage; from Valley Forge and Gettysburg to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Today this heritage is under threat from its own popularity coupled with the reductions in services that come from budgetary shortfalls. That is why Congress and the Obama administration should be commended for including $900 million in the stimulus package specifically for the National Park System.

The deterioration of the National Park System is a national tragedy. It is the most extensive in the world and in 2007 attracted more than 250 million visitors. That is nearly one visit per capita. There are few, if any, other voluntary national programs that can claim that level of popularity. To lose this asset would be to lose one of the greatest tourist attractions in the country and is far more tragic than the loss of a few Wall Street bonus checks. Yet, without increasing the funds available for the Park system, towards which the stimulus package is a first step, these assets will be lost.

The National Park system currently runs at an annual budgetary shortfall of 600 million dollars, or 35%. This doesn’t include funding shortfalls for desperately needed infrastructure projects in order to bring park facilities up to date and that total at least $9 billion.
The state of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the nation’s longest and most visited park, illustrates perfectly the state of the system as a whole. Over 200 of the parkway’s restrooms are outdated and utilize sewage systems which were not designed to handle the volume of visitors the Parkway now sees each year. The roadway itself badly needs to be repaved in sections and many of the views, some of the most impressive in the South, are overgrown or no longer exist.

In terms of day to day operation the Parkway is also in dire straits. This year the management will continue a hiring freeze even though the workforce has declined 10% since 2001 and 25% of the positions are unoccupied. This number jumps to 40% in the upper levels of the management which has resulted in the delay in the development of a master plan for the Parkway’s management in the next decade. Finally, 40% of the parkway’s current employee’s will retire in the next five years and at the current funding levels the Parkway may not be able to replace them.

This pattern is replicated across the country, from Yosemite to the Hawaiian Volcanoes. In the face of these shortfalls the number of visitors to the parks increased by 6 million from 2003-2007. Without increased funding the parks will not survive the onslaught of visitors from a growing population on an aging infrastructure.

The $900 million in the stimulus package represents a first step in what will should be a long march towards rebuilding the infrastructure of the national parks. It also has interesting echoes of the past. While the first national park was founded in 1872 a large part of the current system was developed by another stimulus program about 60 years later. It was the Civilian Conservation Corp, created by Franklin Roosevelt in the Great Depression to employ the masses of recently unemployed workers, that built the infrastructure in dozens of parks all over the country. The current national park system may have been born out of a desire to conserve the precious places in the country but it was the necessity of rescuing the country from the depths of a depression that gave it an accessible and usable infrastructure in those parks. Today Obama and the Congress have the opportunity to help the country out of a recession – studies have shown that $1 invested in the National Park System generates $4 in the larger economy – by investing in the treasure that is the National Park System.

While there have been some accusations that the aid for the National Park System in the House version of the bill – 2.2 billion – was the result of questionable lobbying, the fact that the final version of the bill chose the Senate’s $900 million amount should lay these concerns to rest. This money is needed support that will not be wasted as pork in any one district. Rather, the money will be spread across the nation and it will allow the country to start repairing the damage that too much love has done to one of the nation’s greatest treasures.