Yes -- or at least the Air Miles blurb I just tossed out half an hour ago had something about that. It may, I think, only be able to be applied to trips booked _using_ Air Miles, though.
Well, but that was the part of the Air Miles bumph I actually did notice, you see.
(Possibly because it was waiting when I got back from a trip which involved Eurostar to Paris, and then the new super-duper world's-faster-passenger-railway-except-past-Strasbourg TGV Lyria to Basel. And we came back EasyJet, with CO paid.)
Hi - waves - we have mutual friends but never spoken but I'm very interested in you views on this matter.
I've just landed the world leaders in carbon offsetting as client (they are about to be accredited by the UN and DEFRA) and I've been charged with reviewing their web site and helping them deal with the current offsetting backlash that exists right now.
I'm not sure what I can say that Monbiot hasn't, and I'm not sure it's in my best interests to help with a PR effort for something I think is fairly fundamentally counterproductive.
Meh. That looks rather harsh, but it's the way it is. Sorry. It's nothing personal; and if you want a coherent explanation of why offsetting's largely bogus, I'm not the best qualified to provide it.
Ok - just read his Guardian article and his main flaw here is lumping all offsetting schemes together. There are good ones and crap ones out there. For example, I'm not sure if you know, but a lot of the schemes increase the development and use of low carbon technologys in the developing world which is great if they miss out the middle phase of buying huge power stations.
I wasn't looking for a qualified explanation, just a reaction I suppose. I guess I got it. Thanks anyway.
I'm sure you didn't mean to patronise me. And not that I have to justify myself to you or anyone else but during the course of this project, if I find out to my own satisfaction that Monbiot's argument does indeed hold water, I would not take on another job with that client.
It is a crying shame that Monbiot comes across in such an angry manner - because it is shooting his excellent intentions in the foot!
Having met him (via Oxfam and People and Planet) I know that he may not be, shall we say, aware of how he comes across.
I'm no expert. I'm an ordinary joe. That's why I get employed to help people communicate better. As a professional communicator I get utterly frustrated with the current social climate concerning environmental matters and perceived ecological correctness.
At the moment the environmental message is one of utter incoherence and for the average man and woman on the street (or business man or woman) the sense of doom is almost choking. For you is 'may as well vent before we die', for others it is 'party now, because the distopia is nigh'.
We are are all trying to find our way and our truth through this mess, and I for one would like to find some hope.
When you have NGOs, Govts and respected spokespeople lashing out at each other and at those who are trying to do something rather than use that energy on doing something constructive it is utterly utterly self defeating and I think the damage caused to potential public action is far more severe to our futures than a business 'having a go', paying someone to reduce emissions buy building a wind farm in India, thinking about its carbon footprint for the first time and sticking a few recycling bins in the staff kitchen.
Joe Public sees all this going on and just doesn't know what to think. So he puts out his recycling, opens a bottle of wine and sees if there is anything good on the telly by way of blotting out the doom for another day.
Where's the bottle opener...
Just to add: Some research we did at Oxfam demonstrated that it takes on average about 15 years to achieve a social paradigm shift. We can see this with ending apartheid, Make Trade Fair - going all the way back to ending the slave trade.
We are living in that moment again but this time it is the worlds biggest ever paradigm shift. It will knock terrorism off(or way down) the political agenda in the next 3 years. Govts follow where people lead, they have no choice (and they never were innovators). Yes there will be damage. But I think we still have a chance to avoid the worse case scenarios. I end this comment feeling positive.
I may well be idealistic. But I make no apologies for that.
I think for the average expert (and I mean bona fide climate scientists, not activists like GM) the sense of doom is almost choking. For years now we've been going further down a line of no return; and it is almost guaranteed that we'll continue in that direction for some years yet. We're still building more roads and more airports; we aren't so much rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as drilling extra portholes below the waterline.
I'd be in the "party now" camp except that's an awfully convenient rationalisation and I _could_ be wrong, but as far as I can make out even in the best _possible_ case - ie, all governments worldwide immediately impose austerity measures of a similar stringency to those in place in Britain during WW2 (and manifestly such measures are possible) - we'd still face a fairly dismal outcome, albeit that we might well keep most of the species alive. In the best plausible case - say, people stop being quite so readily distracted into pointless greenwash activities like buying Priuses and biofuels - we're most likely all screwed. I think the most likely case is that global warming is halted only by atmospheric dust from the use of nuclear weapons.
So, ha, I said I wasn't going to write this up, but - reducing potential future emissions in the Third World to justify continued emissions in the First World is like trying to catch fish in a tree next to the river. In particular, we're pretty much at the point where all the readily available supply of fossil fuels is going to get dug up and used in the next few decades - arguably preventing an increase in demand at best delays that slightly. Demand needs to reduce radically so that some of that supply can actually be left in the ground (and, again, that's the bare minimum necessary to effect any meaningful change) - and for that to happen, those Westerners who were going to buy the offsets need _not to fly_ - not to reduce the Third World competition for energy so they can use it themselves.
So offsets, priuses, etc, etc: Inappropriate solutions or stepping stones to change?
So on reading your comment, I, ordinary joe, wanna give up, cocoon into my friends and family and make a mental note to keep a stash of pain killers to swallow when the shit hits the fan.
I clearly remember coming home from school at 12 years old having learned about Hiroshima for the very first time. I stood in the living room looking at the roses growing in the garden and my head was spinning in shock and distress. I cried all evening. It was 1980 and we in the midst of the cold war. There was no where to run to and we had no where to hide.
Here we are again - only it's worse. I know that. But I'm not going to give up. I totally agree - we need a WW2 effort on a global scale. But the beauty of the WW2 effort and its acceptance and adoption by the public was due to raising and maintaining moral. You can achieve a certain amount by haranguing people into change, you can achieve far more by inspiring them.
Offsets, Priuses, etc; actively damaging, giving the warm fuzzy feeling of having done something while actually being somewhere between pointless and negative in effect. Giving people the impression they can keep flying or driving isn't any kind of stepping stone to swallowing the unpalatable truth.
We might achieve _more_ by inspiring people but (regrettably) the only government that seems to be achieving anything is China and they're achieving it by being a repressive police state. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.
I certainly don't see anything wrong with Monbiot's arguments on offsetting, or more generally - most of the hard science in _Heat_ is quite explicit that he's not qualified to discuss the validity of the models, but just discussing what's to be done if they are correct.
The problem with carbon offsets is people want easy answers. They want perfect solutions that operate with 100% efficiency. Funny how they apply such high standards to anyone who tries to do good, while they're perfectly happy to accept rotten fuel efficiency in SUVs, agricultural policies that encourage forest destruction, and so on. The reality is that all our attempts to stop global warming will waste money, so we might as well waste some of that money on do-gooders with new ideas, instead of wasting all of it on the same old rich industrialists. Maybe some of it will turn out to be much less wasteful than we thought.
That's my rantage, and thank you for asking. Good luck with your endeavors.
I have already counseled my client to avoid the easy answer route and they are very aware of the pitfalls.
I gave them this example: In the 1700, Pickfords ran a fleet of canal boats that did most of the haulage in this country on our waterways. They still exist - they run a fleet of articulated lorries instead. At some time in the past they shifted off the water and on to the roads. They knew they were a haulage firm not at canal boat firm.
So I've asked them - are they an emissions reduction business or a climate change solution business. They are all very serious about being the latter, they firmly believe that selling emissions reductions to business is a stepping stone in getting big business and the public to engage with this subject and make changes.
(For business to use this company they have to have an emissions survey done and they get piles of consultancy along with their offsets which make recommendations about how to directly reduce their emissions, how to involved staff, how to communicate accordingly with customers etc. Mr Big Shot CEO doesn't get a quick fix, he gets a report and a challenge with his offset purchase. Which I think is pretty cool.)
They just don't know how to articulate it at the moment. Which is where I come in.
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I just received the email announcing it, which they sent under 20 minutes ago.
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(Possibly because it was waiting when I got back from a trip which involved Eurostar to Paris, and then the new super-duper world's-faster-passenger-railway-except-past-Strasbourg TGV Lyria to Basel. And we came back EasyJet, with CO paid.)
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I've just landed the world leaders in carbon offsetting as client (they are about to be accredited by the UN and DEFRA) and I've been charged with reviewing their web site and helping them deal with the current offsetting backlash that exists right now.
I'd welcome your rantage about this subject.
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Meh. That looks rather harsh, but it's the way it is. Sorry. It's nothing personal; and if you want a coherent explanation of why offsetting's largely bogus, I'm not the best qualified to provide it.
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I wasn't looking for a qualified explanation, just a reaction I suppose. I guess I got it. Thanks anyway.
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It is a crying shame that Monbiot comes across in such an angry manner - because it is shooting his excellent intentions in the foot!
Having met him (via Oxfam and People and Planet) I know that he may not be, shall we say, aware of how he comes across.
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[I don't know if he's consciously reached that conclusion, mind.]
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At the moment the environmental message is one of utter incoherence and for the average man and woman on the street (or business man or woman) the sense of doom is almost choking. For you is 'may as well vent before we die', for others it is 'party now, because the distopia is nigh'.
We are are all trying to find our way and our truth through this mess, and I for one would like to find some hope.
When you have NGOs, Govts and respected spokespeople lashing out at each other and at those who are trying to do something rather than use that energy on doing something constructive it is utterly utterly self defeating and I think the damage caused to potential public action is far more severe to our futures than a business 'having a go', paying someone to reduce emissions buy building a wind farm in India, thinking about its carbon footprint for the first time and sticking a few recycling bins in the staff kitchen.
Joe Public sees all this going on and just doesn't know what to think. So he puts out his recycling, opens a bottle of wine and sees if there is anything good on the telly by way of blotting out the doom for another day.
Where's the bottle opener...
Just to add: Some research we did at Oxfam demonstrated that it takes on average about 15 years to achieve a social paradigm shift. We can see this with ending apartheid, Make Trade Fair - going all the way back to ending the slave trade.
We are living in that moment again but this time it is the worlds biggest ever paradigm shift. It will knock terrorism off(or way down) the political agenda in the next 3 years. Govts follow where people lead, they have no choice (and they never were innovators). Yes there will be damage. But I think we still have a chance to avoid the worse case scenarios. I end this comment feeling positive.
I may well be idealistic. But I make no apologies for that.
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I'd be in the "party now" camp except that's an awfully convenient rationalisation and I _could_ be wrong, but as far as I can make out even in the best _possible_ case - ie, all governments worldwide immediately impose austerity measures of a similar stringency to those in place in Britain during WW2 (and manifestly such measures are possible) - we'd still face a fairly dismal outcome, albeit that we might well keep most of the species alive. In the best plausible case - say, people stop being quite so readily distracted into pointless greenwash activities like buying Priuses and biofuels - we're most likely all screwed. I think the most likely case is that global warming is halted only by atmospheric dust from the use of nuclear weapons.
So, ha, I said I wasn't going to write this up, but - reducing potential future emissions in the Third World to justify continued emissions in the First World is like trying to catch fish in a tree next to the river. In particular, we're pretty much at the point where all the readily available supply of fossil fuels is going to get dug up and used in the next few decades - arguably preventing an increase in demand at best delays that slightly. Demand needs to reduce radically so that some of that supply can actually be left in the ground (and, again, that's the bare minimum necessary to effect any meaningful change) - and for that to happen, those Westerners who were going to buy the offsets need _not to fly_ - not to reduce the Third World competition for energy so they can use it themselves.
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So on reading your comment, I, ordinary joe, wanna give up, cocoon into my friends and family and make a mental note to keep a stash of pain killers to swallow when the shit hits the fan.
I clearly remember coming home from school at 12 years old having learned about Hiroshima for the very first time. I stood in the living room looking at the roses growing in the garden and my head was spinning in shock and distress. I cried all evening. It was 1980 and we in the midst of the cold war. There was no where to run to and we had no where to hide.
Here we are again - only it's worse. I know that. But I'm not going to give up. I totally agree - we need a WW2 effort on a global scale. But the beauty of the WW2 effort and its acceptance and adoption by the public was due to raising and maintaining moral. You can achieve a certain amount by haranguing people into change, you can achieve far more by inspiring them.
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We might achieve _more_ by inspiring people but (regrettably) the only government that seems to be achieving anything is China and they're achieving it by being a repressive police state. I'm not quite sure what to make of that.
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I'd like to see carbon offset money used to prevent rainforest being burnt down: a big win on carbon emissions and lots of other good things.
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That's my rantage, and thank you for asking. Good luck with your endeavors.
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I have already counseled my client to avoid the easy answer route and they are very aware of the pitfalls.
I gave them this example: In the 1700, Pickfords ran a fleet of canal boats that did most of the haulage in this country on our waterways. They still exist - they run a fleet of articulated lorries instead. At some time in the past they shifted off the water and on to the roads. They knew they were a haulage firm not at canal boat firm.
So I've asked them - are they an emissions reduction business or a climate change solution business. They are all very serious about being the latter, they firmly believe that selling emissions reductions to business is a stepping stone in getting big business and the public to engage with this subject and make changes.
(For business to use this company they have to have an emissions survey done and they get piles of consultancy along with their offsets which make recommendations about how to directly reduce their emissions, how to involved staff, how to communicate accordingly with customers etc. Mr Big Shot CEO doesn't get a quick fix, he gets a report and a challenge with his offset purchase. Which I think is pretty cool.)
They just don't know how to articulate it at the moment. Which is where I come in.
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Dunno if Air Miles would go for it, the political message is a bit against their market positioning. (I got to play with their database once)
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