Carbon offsets equal "accountability vaccuum"
A December 2006 survey of the offset business, compiled by a team of specialists in the field, criticized the majority of the companies hawking the product. "There are no widely accepted standards...as to what qualifies as an 'offset' for purposes of making consumers carbon neutral," notes the report, titled A Consumer's Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers. "Almost anyone can offer to sell you almost anything and claim that this purchase will make you carbon neutral." Commissioned by Clean Air-Cool Planet, the study looked at thirty firms and gave the majority of them poor marks.
Whatever their intentions, these companies operate in an accountability vacuum. While the Kyoto Protocol established widely accepted guidelines for countries looking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, at the consumer level there's little agreement about anything--no universal standards for estimating a person's carbon footprint, no agreement on the technologies that are most helpful in reducing global warming and no regulatory body to oversee the industry.
"It's like the Wild West out there," comments Anja Kollmuss, a member of the Climate Initiative team at Tufts University, which has studied the difference between the regulated and unregulated carbon markets.
Source: Center for Investigative Reporting as covered in this article published at The Nation.
Peter C Glover
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