The Carbon Offset Con PDF Print E-mail
Carbon offsetting is all the rage at the moment.  However a new report from Climate Trade Watch, which is affiliated to the Transnational Institute, accuses carbon offset companies of using the same sort of ‘future value accounting’ that caused the collapse of energy giant Enron.

The report argues that when companies like Climate Care and the Carbon Neutral Company sell the public carbon offsets, carbon savings expected to be made in the future are counted as savings made in the present. This is known as ‘future value accounting’ and is the same technique used by Enron to inflate its profits with such disastrous consequences.

The report also argues that offset companies breed complacency by selling ‘peace of mind’ to consumers, offering up a form of ‘greenwash’ that distracts from the serious task of tackling unsustainable consumption patterns and business practices.

 

It’s also amusing to see that the Carbon Neutral Company has been targeted by members of London Rising Tide. Earlier this week, activists from Rising Tide barricaded themselves inside the London HQ of the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC). The protest took place to high-light the damage that offset companies are doing in promoting "climate complacency" in the general public.

Ironically that same day Rising Tide had been invited by the Carbon Neutral Company to take part in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change, which is chaired by the CNC. But Rising Tide instead chose to occupy the offices of the CNC -  a statement against it chairing a committee which they see as a clear conflict of interest given that they are profiting form climate change.

Speaking from the blockade, LRT activist Sam Chase said that, “The Carbon Neutral Company is today occupying the Houses Of Parliament, so we have decided to occupy the Carbon Neutral Company. They have no business chairing a committee like this. Their livelihoods and profit margins depend on exploiting people’s anxiety about climate change, and as such it’s a travesty that they are chairing a governmental panel on climate change.”

Another activist has told SpinWatch how “we spent the day drawing more big slogans (‘Carbon Neutral Con’ being one), ringing the press, playing the blues on the harmonica, throwing executive stressballs at each other, talking over the issues, sleeping, and chatting to the CNC CEO who subsequently told employees that we had refused to talk to him, when in fact he had declined our invitation of a reasoned discourse, albeit through the glass of our barricaded door".

 
“When the police arrived, one asked with dark jocularity if the one of us who was locked on by the neck to the door-blockading-table had any life insurance … And then, with an apology to the man at the desk who we signed in with, (he seemed relaxed about it, fortunately,) we really were free. Yes, free to acknowledge how bedded-in we are to this system built on exploitation and injustice, topped off with a wholesome-looking but totally toxic layer of bullshit and greenwash. Hypocrites? Probably. In that case, how about ‘hypocrites who helped strip away that toxic layer just for a millisecond and let some real daylight flood into the debate’?".

If you want to read The Transnational Institute report – it is available here.

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