Sierra Club Outings and Carbon Offsets
Where does your money go and how does it "offset" your travel?
There are two sides to the carbon offset equation: On one side, you calculate
how much carbon a certain activity emits. Let's use as an example a
flight from San Francisco to Paris. Your personal
share of carbon emissions for that flight equals approximately 4.5 tons. On the
other side of the equation, the folks at NativeEnergy have identified a
potential wind energy project that needs additional funding to be built.
They calculate how much wind energy this project will generate over its lifetime
and assign a dollar figure to each killowatt-hour based on the cost of
generating it. NativeEnergy reasons that every killowatt-hour of clean
energy generated by its project replaces a killowatt-hour that would have
otherwise been generated by a "dirty" energy source, e.g., a coal-fired power
plant. The idea of "offsetting" is that your monetary contribution is responsible
for a share of the wind project that equals the amount of carbon you've emitted
by your activity. In the case of our flight to Paris, you would pay $60 to
NativeEnergy to help fund the building of a wind farm. This model has some obvious
pitfalls: First of all, the term "offset" might imply that you are
"neutralizing" the impact of your travel, and thus it has no impact. This is not
the case. Once you have emitted carbon, it is released into the atmosphere and you can't "take it back."
What offsetting does is help reduce carbon emissions elsewhere. Next, the offset model attempts to neatly
compress a very complex set of calculations into a tidy equation, when in
actuality, it relies on a series of
assumptions and estimates. For example, the folks at NativeEnergy have to
estimate how many passengers are on an average flight and make predictions as to
how much energy a given turbine will produce over its lifetime. In addition,
there is a good deal of debate among global warming experts about just how much
impact flying has on global warming. So it's important to keep in mind that the
numbers generated by a carbon calculator are estimates. Finally, the
relationship between your travel choices and carbon emissions is of course not
as cut-and-dry as is assumed by the offset model. After all, if you don't get on
that flight to Paris, the plane will still fly. The idea of course is that
cumulatively, the less we all fly, the less demand there will be for air travel,
and the less additional supply the airlines will deliver. On the other side of
the equation, the more market demand we can create for clean energy, the better. Given all of these issues, you may be wondering why
we offer offsets at all. We have several reasons: One, we feel that letting you
calculate your carbon footprint is a valuable educational
tool. NativeEnergy's calculator gives you an idea of the relative amounts
of carbon emitted by various activities, and we think that this is the first step toward changing
your behavior and living a less carbon-intensive life. Second, we think that the
wind energy projects sponsored by NativeEnergy represent a valuable step toward
becoming less dependent on coal-fired power plants. Even though the carbon
offset calculation is not quite as neat and tidy as is presented by many in this
industry, we believe that offsetting with NativeEnergy helps build demand for
clean energy. You should know that we went through a
detailed proposal process before choosing NativeEnergy, and we are confident
that their calculations are conservative and that they fund quality projects.
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