As travel companies struggle to embrace
environmentally responsible practices -- reducing greenhouse gas
emissions, investing in renewable energy sources and trying to
mitigate their carbon footprint -- the sale of carbon offsets is
quickly evolving into a booming market.
But it is also a
Wild West sort of market that lacks any meaningful standards and is
rife with unregulated, uncertified suppliers selling the promise of
a simple, conscience-salving solution to an extremely complex
problem.
At its most basic
level, a carbon offset is a fancy term for planting trees, saving
forests and funding renewable-energy projects. Of these, the public
is most aware of the planting of trees. Through the process of
photosynthesis, trees take in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas
widely believed to be a major cause of global warming, and emit
oxygen, a crucial element for sustaining life.
Plant enough
trees, the logic goes, and you can undo much of the pollution
generated by our seemingly insatiable appetite for the energy that
powers our sundry technologies -- including, of course, the
machines that take us from point A to point B and the buildings in
which we seek shelter and sustenance once we get to our
destination.
Carbon offsets
are sold as investments in our aggregate well-being. They can be
purchased by individual consumers, businesses or other
organizations that want to help mitigate the tons of carbon dioxide
being poured into the earth's atmosphere daily by burning fossil
fuels for transportation, heat, light, manufacturing and just plain
convenience.
In addition to
planting trees, the money raised by the sale of carbon offsets is
used to protect rain forests or build wind, solar or hydroelectric
generators that produce power with far fewer greenhouse emissions
than burning, nonrenewable fuels like coal, oil or natural
gas.
Over the past 18
months, carbon offsets have been widely embraced by a large number
of businesses, including many in the travel industry, and by
millions of individuals determined to do something to help turn
around the threat of global warming and its potential for
devastating the planet's ecosystems.
There now appears
to be an acceptance of the idea that global warming is real and
that immediate steps need to be taken to reduce greenhouse gases.
Thus the growing popularity of carbon offsets, billed as an almost
painless means of improvements in the environment.
More feel-good than do-good?
But carbon
offsets are also generating controversy as an unregulated
marketplace where the rule of thumb is buyer beware. Critics of
carbon offsets, a group that includes some environmentalists and
climate scientists, say that the plans may appear to be doing more
good than they actually are. They are frequently described as
feel-good efforts that are diverting attention from the real
problem of how to vastly reduce greenhouse gases without damaging
the world's economy.
"To some, carbon
offsets are kind of like committing the crime and asking for
forgiveness later," said Michelle White, director of environmental
affairs for Fairmont Hotels & Resorts.
White supports
quality offsets, but only as an addition to carbon
reduction.
At Fairmont,
working with the Pembina Institute, a Canadian nonprofit
organization that helps analyze business processes to reduce
environmental impacts, the hotel company has targeted carbon
generated by front-desk computers, White said, embracing
efficiencies that reduce carbon emissions at its hotels by
approximately 300,000 tons per year.
As public concern
over global warming grows, travel in particular has come under the
gun because it adds carbon to the atmosphere through international
and domestic travel.
When most people
think of travel-related pollution, they picture jet engines and
diesel-electric trains. In fact, the biggest sources are not
conveyances but destinations -- hotels, convention centers, arenas
and other buildings that gobble up energy.
For that reason,
many hotels and resorts are using renewable energy programs, such
as purchasing wind power alternatives or replacing incandescent
bulbs with more environmentally friendly fluorescent lights that
reduce carbon and energy costs. It has become common not only to
encourage customers to consider offsets of travel to hotel
locations but also to take other steps to improve energy efficiency
as common-sense tools.
But while
conservation is crucial, the travel economy is expected to grow at
an unprecedented pace over the next decade, especially as China and
India send out tens of millions more travelers each year into an
already strained infrastructure. Carbon offsets are being touted as
an essential tool to counter their impact.
The problem is
that serious questions remain about how efficient these programs
really are, who is running them and if their real motivation is
public service or profit. The bottom line, providers and users of
offsets seem to agree, is: Who do you trust?
Unfortunately,
the answer is being sought amid mounting public pressure to act
quickly to combat global warming.
Former Vice
President Al Gore's highly publicized campaign to draw attention to
global warming and his Oscar-winning documentary on the subject,
"An Inconvenient Truth," has aroused public debate.
Jumping on the bandwagon
At the same time,
pressure from environmental lobbies around the world, abetted by
many scientists and myriad other interests, has pushed governments
and business leaders onto the bandwagon.
Even President
Bush, after years of rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and other
international efforts to mitigate global warming, announced in a
United Nations speech this month that he would launch efforts to
encourage reduction of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
Bush's shift is
one of numerous indications of a growing concern about the
consequences of inaction. The growing popularity of carbon offsets
is another.
"There was a lot
of controversy in the U.K. recently when it came to the public's
attention that Prime Minister Tony Blair was traveling without
purchasing carbon offsets," recalled Adam Markham, executive
director of Clean Air-Cool Planet, a U.S. nonprofit group that
works on global-warming mitigation. In the U.K., he noted,
government policy "calls for carbon-offsetting of
travel."
"When the queen
traveled to the U.S., her travel was offset," he said. "When things
like that happen, you know carbon offsets have reached a
significant level of public concern."
At the recent World Travel and Tourism
Council Summit in Lisbon, Travelport, whose subsidiaries Orbitz and
Galileo have investigated and strongly support carbon-offset
campaigns, paid to offset the carbon emissions generated by the 600
participants who traveled to Portugal for the
conference.
But while hotels,
airlines and online travel agencies have embraced carbon offsets at
some level, there is growing concern about the offsets themselves.
One major worry is that there are very few standards -- none set by
government regulators -- to define what constitutes a responsible
offset project.
Certification of
carbon-offset providers is also a major issue. Industry sources
admit that the providers clearly are not equally
credible.
And while
information on carbon offsets is not hard to find, evaluating
providers is more difficult. Yet industries, travel among them, are
rushing headlong into offset programs for reasons ranging from
corporate citizenship to image-building to concerns about long-term
liabilities.
"A lot of
financial experts are saying that carbon statements will become as
important as financial statements," said Julian Cacchioli, a
spokesman for Galileo. "Corporations have realized they have to be
responsible. Investors, employees and others are demanding
it.
"Companies are
looking for information. We need to be able to say that on a
short-haul flight, you are having an impact of X grams of carbon or
on a long-haul flight, X grams of carbon. We need to understand
exactly what our impact is, because companies are paying for this,
and it can be a huge expenditure. We need to pay enough and not pay
too much."
Galileo and
sister company Orbitz, are positioning themselves to play leading
roles in helping to supply that information.
"As science
becomes more sophisticated, and as we see that airlines may have
different impacts with load factors and other factors included,
Galileo is able to help say what that impact is," Cacchioli said.
"We process 800,000 transactions a day. We have more information
than anyone else and can feed this information to companies.
Accuracy is very important here.
"As information
becomes more real-time and we become more sophisticated, we can
provide information so that a traveler can make a decision up
front: What is the impact if you fly, travel by train, or if you
drive? That is something that Galileo is uniquely able to
do."
The level of data
is not as sophisticated today as it is expected to be soon, he
said. But people are starting to be able to find it.
"There will be a
culture shift when that happens, and we are not that far away,"
Cacchioli asserted. "The changes we have seen over the past year
are exponential compared with the last five years."
But letting
people know what their output of greenhouse gases will be on any
given leg of a journey is only half of the solution.
The crucial other
half, and by far the bigger challenge, is coming up with a proven
means of undoing, or somehow effectively compensating for, whatever
damage one's travel causes.
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