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.
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