Sam was just paying for yet another piece of porn and noticed that the website offered the option, for a small additional fee, of offsetting any damage caused by watching the porn. Sam was vaguely aware that there probably was some damage caused, associated with making the porn, but porn was far too enjoyable to just give it up. But there was a small amount of guilt associated with Sam’s porn watching. Maybe offsetting could remove that guilt? So Sam investigated further. What was this offsetting? The website had a link that explained. There was an offsetting NGO that showed a picture of a schoolgirl, Maria. The NGO explained that Maria was an indigenous Amazon virgin schoolgirl in danger of being kidnapped, sold and trafficked as a sex slave to the porn industry. Sam’s small additional fee would enable them to keep Maria safe, thus the damage not caused to Maria would offset any damage caused by Sam watching the porn. So Sam paid the fee and felt better for it, and the porn website was pleased because they appeared to be doing something to become more ethical.
What Sam didn’t know, was that the NGO was keeping Maria safe by kidnapping her and separating her from her family. Also after 30 months of gathering in offsetting fees and taking publicity photos of Maria, the NGO would sell and traffic Maria as a sex slave for the porn industry anyway. Not only that, but instead of Maria being sold at the beginning of the 30 months, Isabella, her school friend down the road, was kidnapped and sold instead. The steady supply of virgin sex slaves for the porn industry did not halt for an instant.
This fable is the exact parallel to what happens with carbon offsetting on your plane flights etc. Just change months to years and virgin schoolgirl to virgin rain forest.
Offsetting NGOs either buy outright or buy the logging rights to a plot of virgin rain forest and promise that it won’t be cut down for at least 30 years while they collect offsetting fees. They exclude the indigenous population who were living a sustainable lifestyle on that land. The excluded people then have to take up a new way of living, which is likely to depend on either poaching, logging or both. Although this plot of virgin rain forest is saved for 30 years, a neighbouring unprotected plot is still felled, and the supply of valuable timber doesn’t halt for an instant.
Of course the 30 year delay probably started many years ago. The first carbon offsetting scheme started just over 30 years ago. So the time for protecting that virgin rain forest is probably a lot shorter than 30 years.
There are other offsetting schemes that aren’t quite as bad as this, but all of them are flawed, unless they are similar to the Iceland carbon dioxide sequestration project that turns it into rock. Anything less is probably going to release the carbon back into the atmosphere – eventually. The current cost of the Iceland project is nearly $1,500 per tonne of carbon. So any carbon sequestration scheme that is cheaper than this is suspect. Maybe the scheme plants trees, but what if the trees burn in a forest fire? Are they insured for replacement? What if the scheme area is disrupted by armed violence as with the Dutch NGO, Face the Future and Mount Elgon National Park in eastern Uganda? Maybe carbon dioxide is being captured and stored in an old oil or gas field. Will those storage caverns leak? Or is the stored carbon dioxide being used to push out the last difficult bits of oil or gas that otherwise would have been left in the ground. It’s a minefield of problems,
Basically any carbon offsetting scheme is suspect if it is much cheaper than $1,500 per tonne of carbon.
