John Edwards: Environmental champion or dupe?

You've got to hand it to John Edwards. He's always trying to do the right thing, or at least appear to be doing the right thing. Last week he announced that his campaign for the White House will be a sustainable one, through the use of the latest fad in environmental circles: carbon offsets. It's a nice idea in theory -- facing the reality that one can't tour the country without producing significant amounts of greehouse gases, he's going to pay someone else to compensate for his emissions. But I've never been too enamored of the idea, and last week one of my favorite science journalists, Fred Pearce of New Scientist, confirmed my suspicions.

You've probably heard of carbon offsets before. Our own Chris "Intersection" Mooney" has used them to green his otherwise laudable book tours.

Here's Edwards' email announcement:

We cannot wait until the next president is elected to begin to take action on global warming....That's why today I'm announcing my commitment to make my campaign "carbon neutral"--meaning we will offset the impact of all our energy use to ensure that our campaign does not contribute to global warming.

To achieve carbon neutrality, we're taking two big steps. First, we're implementing a number of simple but effective techniques to conserve energy in our national and field offices. And I've asked my staff to take concrete steps to reduce their own energy consumption.... I have also directed the campaign to purchase carbon offsets that support alternative energy production to neutralize the global warming impact from our travel and office energy use.

Which is better than doing nothing, or the alternative of staying at home in his North Carolina mansion, powering the place with windmills and doing virtual appearances across the country. But as even Mooney concedes,

all sorts of assumptions go into calculating just how many credits one has to buy to offset X number of miles in the air. But I figure that if I buy to cover almost double the amount of actual miles, I should be on the safe side.

But is even that enough?

The problem with carbon offsets, as Pearce explains, is that this new service is completely unregulated and offers no guarantees. Most of these services began by planting trees, which in theory can soak up all the CO₂ spewed out during your travel, but only if they actually manage to survive long enough. And how confident can you be that the offsetting service you've contracted will stick around all that time? Even in the short-term there are unpredictable factors to consider:

The uncertainty over tree planting was dramatically highlighted when rock group Coldplay vowed to offset emissions from the production of their 2002 album A Rush of Blood to the Head. They paid for 10,000 mango trees to be planted in India. Accounts differ, but something went badly wrong and around 4000 of the trees died.

Some of the more sophisticated services have switched to investing in renewable and sustainable technologies, and Edwards, to his credit, seems to recognize the wisdom of this shorter-term strategy. But there's lots of problems there, too. Each service has its own formula for calculating how effective their chosen technologies will be. And it's still mostly about offsetting today's real carbon emissions by reducing theoretical emissions in the future. A couple more excerpts from Pearce' feature:

The trouble is that nobody can be sure about the future. Even apparently copper-bottomed additionality can spring a leak. In 2005, for example, Climate Care funded the distribution of free energy-efficient light bulbs in a slum in Cape Town, South Africa, and sold the offset emissions. Yet a few months later, power company Eskom responded to blackouts with an energy-saving programme that involved distributing similar bulbs in the same township.
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Many governments in the developing world worry about the probity of letting rich nations carrying out carbon offsetting in their countries - they call it CO2lonialism. One day soon, countries like India, China and Brazil will probably have to accept their own limits on emissions. At that point, they may discover that the easiest, cheapest offset options have already been used up by western companies.
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What does seem fair criticism is that efforts to portray offsets as simple, quick fixes pose serious questions of both commercial and ecological legitimacy. Sceptics argue there is no substitute for cutting emissions. For them, "dump, burn and offset" is the worst possible outcome. In February a radical group called London Rising Tide occupied the office of CarbonNeutral, accusing the company of creating a "smokescreen" behind which corporations will be able to keep increasing emissions. That is a political judgement rather than a scientific one - as far as the climate is concerned, a tonne of CO2 pulled out of the atmosphere is as good as a tonne of CO2 that never entered it - but the group still has a point. Buying an offset implies a degree of certainty that we do not have.

This is not to say that carbon offsets are necessarily a bad idea. And I'm glad Edwards is at least trying to do something about the ecological impact of what are now hugely expensive campaigns. But unless he's also talking about doing something substantive about the country's fossil-fuel habits when in office, then it's most a rhetorical device.

There are hints he is prepared to try. Another of his email announcements includes this vision:

We need transformational change to stop global warming and create a new energy economy that helps fuel the growth of a secure middle class in the 21st century. By changing our energy infrastructure and investing in research, development and deployment of alternative energy technologies, we can create more than a million new jobs in America. We must set an example for the world by implementing a cap on carbon emissions and through dramatically increasing our national and individual energy efficiency.

That puts him at the front of the pack on the environmental issues. Which isn't saying much. Last week I attended a talk by James Howard Kunstler, and was reminded just how milquetoast statements like Edwards' seem compared with the real challenges that lie ahead. Even if Kunstler is overly pessimistic by a factor of three, it still suggests there's a huge gap between what is politically possible and is necessary to avoid a very Long Emergency, as the man calls it.