Carbon Offsets: The Indispensable Indulgence

This is a new piece I wrote for Yale Environment 360

by Richard Conniff

The idea of buying carbon offsets — compensating for your own global-warming emissions by paying somebody else to reduce theirs — has provoked a lot of inflammatory rhetoric over the past few years. The standard trope is that it’s like the old practice of buying indulgences from the Catholic Church: You get to commit environmental sin — driving your SUV or living in your McMansion — and still sit at the right hand of God. Offsets are a “get out of a jail free” card, or even, according to one overwrought writer in the Rocky Mountain News, a way of getting away with murder: You shoot somebody, then ease your guilt by holding a bandage on the wound until the ambulance arrives.

Well, OK, tweaking hypocrites can be great fun, and you feel so much better about yourself afterward. I’ve done it myself, mocking forestry offsets in a commentary on NPR. But here’s the hitch: I’m contributing to global warming and so are you, by all the usual means — driving cars, flying planes, heating or cooling homes, and consuming electricity (to write and read this article, among many other things). We can ignore it and just bump up the hypocrisy quota a bit. But if we choose to do something about it, the solution will almost certainly include offsets.

If it has never been clear to you what an offset is, you have plenty of company. Here’s a quick primer: The average American produces about 20 tons of global-warming emissions annually, mostly from burning fossil fuels. Markets now exist that allow you to offset each ton by paying somebody else to reduce their emissions by one ton. In countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol, some companies buy offsets to help meet compulsory emissions limits. The U.S. Congress is also considering such limits in this country, and a regional system affecting utilities goes into operation in 10 Northeastern states on January 1. But for individuals and most businesses, buying offsets is a voluntary choice made for do-good and feel-right reasons.

Offsets make sense because

A PRIMATE NAMED SAVAGE

A nineteenth-century tale of disease, perseverance, scientific infighting, and a landmark of natural history (featured in the September issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine)

 

Gorilla skull, 1849

 

 

 

On July 16, 1847, a missionary newly arrived in New York City from West Africa packed a collection of bones in a box and shipped them off to a colleague in Massachusetts. In a letter, Thomas S. Savage admitted to being “quite unwell,” probably meaning “utterly wretched.” He had already endured tropical diseases in Liberia off and on for more than a decade, and he’d seen his first two wives languish and die there, probably of malaria. He wasn’t the sort to complain lightly.

In any case, his weakened state was evident. He had at first misplaced the list of contents for the box. And despite his original plan “to describe the bones of the animal myself,” he had to ask his colleague to handle that chore. Describing the creature’s habits “will be about all that I shall be able to do.” A few weeks later, as he recuperated at his family home in Middletown, Connecticut, he wrote again: “Will you inform me whether you received the two canine teeth of the best male cranium? I remember that one came out, but cannot tell whether I replaced it. I have not seen it since I sent the bones.”

What he sent was sensational enough. In mid-August at the Boston Society of Natural History, Savage and his coauthor, Harvard anatomist Jeffries Wyman, together presented one of the most startling and important discoveries in the science of life on Earth, a disturbingly humanoid creature that would soon enter popular lore and also play a key part in the coming debate over Darwinian evolution.

They called their new species “gorilla.”