Paying For Our Pollution
A recent poll in Britain found that a tenth of Britons would consider paying to offset the greenhouse gases they generate while flying on holiday. And at least 14 British companies--twice as many such firms as any other country has produced--are busily collecting money from conscientious travellers and other concerned individuals as well as firms. They promise to make the offending carbon dioxide disappear from thin air by, for instance, planting trees that will suck it in or cutting other people's emissions elsewhere. The Carbon Trust, funded by the British government, believes that the market for these offsets is growing by 60% a year in Britain.
Britain's environment department, DEFRA, says one problem is that offset providers use different methods of calculating emissions. This is because there are disagreements over exactly how they should be counted, given that an airplane's emissions per passenger will vary depending on factors ranging from how full it is to the weather.
But the result is that passengers who want to neutralise the impact of identical flights may be given widely differing estimates by different firms of the size of the offset required. Nor do firms use the same plan in calculating just how much carbon planting a tree soaks up. Futhermore, many of the methods used to create offsets are dubious. A study by Stefan Gossling, of Lund University in Sweden, found that three-quarters of firms selling voluntary offsets base them on forestry. Yet this way of sequestering carbon is controversial. Trees may wither and die before absorbing much CO2, and will in time decay, releasing it back into the atmosphere.
Efforts are now being made to clean up this murky market. Industry groups are drawing up voluntary standards, some stricter than others. But a profusion of benchmarks may just confuse consumers. DEFRA reckons a single standard could create offsets and provide transparent pricing. I want to know what you think of this new industry. Would you pay for the pollution you put into the air? Do you think that other countries will follow this same example?
4 comments:
I would consider paying for the emissions I release into the atmosphere if it were obvious that the money I was spending would actually make a difference. I do not think that it would be reasonable for me to pay for a company to plant a tree on my behalf when I could easily do it myself for much less than what they would charge. I do not think many, if any countries will follow Britain's example until some type of technology is developed that can remove large amounts of pollution from the atmosphere.
I agree with matt in that I would be willing to pay, as long as I knew it would serve a real purpose. I want to know that my money is being spent on what it is suposed to be spent on. I don't think many other countries will pick up this system untill it is a certainty that it will work. People don't like the govenment taking their money for one thing and using it for another. I know our country does that and so I don't think we would adopt this system until that problem was solved.
I already pay for the emissions I put into the air, either through taxes that trickle down into the price of my utilities, the taxes I pay on my gas, etc.
However, I would be apt to conserve more energy if the government had proper means of detecting energy use and taxed me accordingly. My incentive would be to conserve then, however it is almost impossible for the government to accurately observe and enforce such a tax directly imposed on the consumer.
This is the same question being asked with gasoline. Are people willing to pay more to move to the green fuel ethonal. Well honestly, most people are not. Well I don't want to go that far. They would love to change to a different more environment friendly fuel, but they just don't have the money to do so. In both cases the market for different ways of handling pollution are there. It's just whether or not company's are willing to take a chance on people caring enough about the world to change it. Or even having the ability to change it. Hopefully we can slide into alternative ways of transportation and decrease pollution, but the transformation will be slow and I don't see these issues being cleared up in a matter of years.
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