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Beyond twisty bulbs

A look at carbon offsets and teh hard realities of saving the planet
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Air travel has been called "a sin" by some environmentalists because it produces more greenhouse gases per person/kilometre than other modes of travel.

Awareness, if not acceptance, of global warming appears to have reached a critical tipping point. For the majority of Canadians the eco-awareness light bulb has gone off — and predictably it’s a CFL, a compact fluorescent light bulb, or as they are more colloquially known, a twisty bulb.

As the awareness of the potentially devastating impacts of global warming increases, so does the average citizen’s desire to do more than replace burned out incandescent bulbs with low wattage, eco-friendly compact fluorescents. And what most of us want to do falls somewhere between composting when convenient and contemplating blowing the kids’ college fund on a shiny new Prius. We want to save the planet; we just don’t want it to be too expensive or too inconvenient.

The Resort Municipality of Whistler and Tourism Whistler are adding another tool to the arsenal of the average environmentally aware citizen. The two organizations are joining forces to create an easy to use, web-based carbon calculator, aimed at visitors. The concept, which has been proposed by various Whistler 2020 task forces, will go from paper to practice in the next six months thanks to seed money from the province’s Community Action on Energy Efficiency (CAEE).

Ian Dunn, director of marketing services for Tourism Whistler, is excited about the possibilities the new project presents.

“With us managing the whistler.com website, that’s the key tie-in and obviously with it being such an important issue for our visitors its something we’re really keen on and excited to be working on.”

Dunn sees two objectives for the project: its primary purpose is to help the environment; its secondary objective is to support Whistler as an eco-friendly destination.

“The goal, as I see it, is basically to facilitate reducing or offsetting the impact of carbon emissions that could be generated by a trip to Whistler,” says Dunn. “We want to continue to position Whistler as a sustainable destination.”

While both the municipality and Tourism Whistler will be involved with the planning and execution of the project, ultimately TW will be managing the end product, as the calculator will be part of the popular whistler.com website.

And while concern over global warming seems like a natural fit for ski resorts, Dunn believes it’s the first time such an endeavour has been taken on by a tourism marketing association.

“I think it’s a growing issue in our audience in terms of importance, and that’s reflective of how important global warming has become as a major issue for everyone. With it having such a large impact on ski resorts, it has become an important issue that resorts need to address.”

Carbon calculators are useful tools to raise environmental awareness — and awareness is the first step towards action. Once a user can assess their carbon output they can decide how, or if, they want to offset those emissions. For the individual, purchasing a carbon offset may feel pretty good, but like any consumer transaction it has a component of buyer beware.

The way carbon offsets work is simple. The amount of carbon that a company or person generates for a specific activity, say travel, is calculated and a monetary value for an action to neutralize that carbon — such as planting trees — is assigned. (The RMOW/TW calculator may also suggest an activity, such as weather-stripping your home, that would offset the damage of your vacation’s contribution to greenhouse gases.)

Planting trees serves to pack an environmental one-two punch: first off, trees are the best carbon reservoirs ever grown; secondly, the largest carbon neutralizing area we have in Canada, the Boreal forest, is being destroyed at the rate of just under 1.5 acres every two seconds and these trees need replacing. (That’s roughly the size of a football field being destroyed to create pulp that will end up in our homes as such glamorous items as toilet paper and junk mail, both of which can be manufactured using recycled paper.) It would appear that at the core of this destruction is simple, old-fashioned greed. Logging the Boreal forest, with its undemanding landscape and spindly Jack pines and Sitka spruce, is easy. Ease translates to speed, speed to volume and volume to increased profit. Last calculated in 2005, the logging of the Boreal forest was worth $41.9 billion .

Despite such environmental travesties as the decimation of Canada’s largest carbon reservoir, carbon offsets are far from being accepted as a vital part of individual environmental efforts, the way that recycling and composting have come to be accepted. One factor contributing to this lack of acceptance may be that carbon offsets are a relatively new idea at the consumer level. Another factor may be, like so many issues around climate change, the idea of offsetting carbon emissions is, in and of itself, controversial.

To date, the sale of carbon offsets at a consumer level has predominantly been tied in to existing services, such as airline travel and car rentals. Earlier this spring, Air Canada launched its voluntary carbon offset program joining Cathay Pacific, Virgin Blue and SAS. Another airline, Silverjet, upped the ante on carbon offsets substantially when they took to the sky in January. A transatlantic carrier specializing in business class travel between New York and London, Silverjet has incorporated mandatory carbon offsets, building the cost of the offset into their tickets. Closer to home, Harbour Air, became the world’s first carbon neutral floatplane carrier this year.

The car rental conglomerate of Enterprise, Alamo and National introduced their carbon offset program at the end of October. For $1.25 per rental, customers in the U.S. and Canada can offset their vehicles’ CO2 emissions. The company plans to introduce the program into the European market mid-2008. With close to half a million cars in its combined national and international fleets, the impact could be substantial — if customers purchase the offsets.

From a cynical point of view, the move could be seen as basic good marketing. For example, on its website, Enterprise notes, “More than our logo is green”. A click on the link takes you to a page detailing the company’s environmental platform, from making Flexfuel and hybrid vehicles available to committing to plant a million trees annually for the next 50 years. Is this little more than market-driven response to the environmental tipping point? Alternatively, is this company expressing a desire to be a good corporate citizen? And ultimately, does it matter? Most people, on either side of the carbon offset argument, would agree, it’s a step, perhaps a small step, but a step in the right direction nonetheless.

Lifestyle changes

The RMOW/TW carbon calculator program will be one of the first voluntary programs that focuses on individual travelers and will assess all modes of transportation. However, will the average visitor buy in? More importantly, will it change anything?

As environmentalists fight to save the Boreal forest, many of them are questioning the value of purchasing carbon offsets. Canada’s Boreal forest, a band of northern forest that runs from the Yukon to Newfoundland, accounts for 90 per cent of the country’s intact forests. With a landmass of slightly more than half of the country, it is Canada’s most important ecosystem. In addition, it holds approximately seven times the total annual global output of greenhouse gas emissions from burning of fossil fuels — more than 47 billion tonnes of carbon. It’s miraculous. Or, as writer Penni Mitchell aptly described the forest in an Op Ed piece in the Winnipeg Free Press : it’s “Mother Nature’s Shop Vac.”

So, shouldn’t we want to expend every effort to save The Boreal forest? Apparently it’s not so simple. Many activists working for the country’s most developed environmental organizations remain unconvinced that carbon offsets will have a dramatic impact on changing the course of global warming.

Kim Fry, a forestry campaigner with Greenpeace, says she finds the whole concept of carbon offsets to be “tricky.”

“I know that I have to travel for my work,” she says. “When I do, I really want to be able to offset that. There are times when you have no choice but to emit and therefore offsetting is a good option.”

Fry, who works in the organization’s national office in Toronto, acknowledges that while she has to travel for work, she can better manage that need in her personal life.

“I’ve often thought I’d like to move to B.C. — I love B.C. Every time I go there I wonder why I live in Ontario. And then, I realize, right, my friends and family all live in Ontario. If I moved, I’d be travelling a lot more,” she says.

Fry worries that offsetting may promote a “business-as-usual” feeling.

“I think there is a danger, and it’s very well-detailed in George Monbiat’s book Heat . He talks about the tax that the Catholic Church used to levy… we’ll call it the Sin Tax. You pay X amount of money for this sin or that sin and then it would clear your conscience.

“There’s a bit of this attitude right now with this current environmental renaissance. You can continue to live your lifestyle, as is, and then just buy some offsets, a Prius and organic food, but continuing to live exactly as you are. There’s a real danger to that.”

Acknowledging the realities of contemporary life, Fry is quick to point out that she is in no way suggesting that everyone has to take up a completely agrarian lifestyle.

“But I do think people need to scale back in their consumption. People need to be thinking through the choices that they make a lot more carefully.

“Flying to Cuba every winter, the East Coast every summer and Europe whenever you feel like it — that’s a luxury that we can’t continue to have.”

She believes that people need to become more committed to living their lives with a smaller geographical footprint, taking into consideration not only how they live, work and play, but where they do.

“We need to start to live more locally. Push for measures that allow our society to live more locally. Create community gardens. Grow food in your yard. Get to know your neighbours, collectively buy a car that is shared by everyone on the street instead of everyone owning their own car. There are so many things that are possible if you root yourself more locally.”

Fry is well aware that the call for this type of wholesale change is likely to raise a cry of deprivation, but believes a mind shift can happen.

“I don’t like to use the word sacrifice… but as a society, in North America, we have to scale back the lifestyle we’ve grown accustomed to. We need to not take some of those luxuries as a given because we can offset. We are truly facing a crisis like humanity has never faced before. We need a large-scale societal transformation in order to get through that. We need things like not traveling, except in rare circumstances, instead of offsetting.

“What is necessary is probably what more people want. If you ask people to map out the vision of their ideal community and neighbourhood it involves bikes, green spaces, water and trees, play spaces. Those are the kinds of things we actually need to build to move towards a more carbon-neutral culture,” says Fry.

She believes that getting involved now is the only way to ensure the type of future we all want.

“We have the time to build those things quickly and democratically. Or we can wait until it’s an absolute crisis and we can wait for an authoritarian government to impose all kinds of restrictions on what we’re able to do in a very undemocratic way. To me, these are the two options.

“Change is going to happen. Is it going to happen in a way you can actually plug in and participate and help mould it into something beautiful and democratic? Or are you going to wait until it’s imposed on you?”

Pushing governments

Anna Baggio of Canadian Parks and Wildnerness’s Wildland League is also cautious when it comes to carbon offsets, particularly when it comes to industry purchasing offsets.

“Carbon offsets are something that we’re looking at right now, because we would certainly like to see forests protected through a carbon offset approach. But we think that approach needs to be part and parcel of a comprehensive package whereby no industry is let off the hook. They would have to reduce emissions to a certain level and within that there would be some sort of carbon-offset program. Each industry has to be held to some type of target they would have to meet.

“We wouldn’t want it to be a license to pollute because you’d given money to keep a forest standing,” says the director of Conservation Land Use Planning.

Nevertheless, Baggio admits when it comes to what the individual can do, she encourages simple things like converting to unbleached coffee filters or carpooling.

“I think people will do things that are in their own self-interest. Do little things. For example, my boyfriend is a plumber and he installed two low-flush toilets in our house,” she says.

While Baggio feels that incidents such as freak weather aid in people connecting the dots on the issue of global climate change, she believes the real change will not happen at the individual level.

“We need to put pressure on our governments to step up and do something. Encourage shifts in policy at that level.”

Putting pressure on governments and corporations is something of a specialty for Tzeporah Berman. Berman, who first garnered notice as part of the Clayquot Sound protests in 1993, has had a career that has evolved with the environmental movement, moving from blockades to boardrooms. As a founding member of the international organization, ForestEthics, Berman has been instrumental in getting out the message that traditional Canadian logging practices are hastening the death of the planet’s forests. Earlier this year she gained more exposure for her message, being featured in Leonardo DiCaprio’s documentary The 11 th Hour , which explores the human role in global warming.

Berman thinks that carbon offsets can be part of the solution — if only as a transitory measure.

“I think the most important thing for us to be doing at a local, provincial and national level is to ensure a cap-and-trade program and strong legislation to reduce emissions. We will not achieve the solution at the level we need to without that. Carbon offsets are, in my opinion, a transition to that system,” she says.

(A cap and trade system employs economic incentives to reduce emissions and control pollution. A government agency would set a cap, or limit, on the amount of emissions allowed for specific industry. Companies requiring more could purchase additional credits from companies that pollute less. In theory, this economic disincentive would make companies comply with the recommended limits.)

“There are lots of problems inherent with a private market for carbon offsets,” says Berman. “For example, there’s no registration so there’s no guarantee that when you buy a carbon offset that the project isn’t also being offset by someone else’s dollars.”

She is also concerned about what exactly is being offset.

“Right now when you buy a carbon offset that’s related to forests, primarily you’re planting trees, but old growth forest that we have in this country — that are the single largest carbon bank in the world — are still being logged. You can’t buy a carbon offset yet to ensure conservation of old growth forest,” says the cofounder of ForestEthics.

Like Fry and Baggio, Berman thinks there has to be more emphasis on shifting North American lifestyle expectations.

“We can’t consume our way out of these problems. We have to commit to changing our behaviour. There have been so many studies that show that quality of life does not come from a quantity of stuff. We have to look at how much time we spend in our communities and with our families. A sustainable lifestyle does not mean a reduced quality of life,” she reasons.

While Berman sees it as absolutely critical that we all carry environmental awareness into everything we do, she sees the most significant role as belonging to government.

“It’s not enough to change what we buy and to change our lifestyle, because the situation we are in is so grave that it will not be solved without legislative change. And legislative change means we all need to engage with our elected officials. We need to be writing those letters and supporting environmental groups who are co-ordinating mobilization campaigns. Push decision makers to ensure strong reductions in emissions and protections of our last wild places.

“In the end, I think it’s more important to reduce our own emissions through our lifestyle changes and to support strong legislation than it is to buy a carbon offset,” says Berman. “There are no quick fixes to global warming and to protect biodiversity. I worry that carbon offsets give us a false sense of security.”

Whistler’s efforts

Over at the RMOW, sustainability initiatives manager Ted Battison is aware, but not particularly worried, about the criticism that has befallen carbon offsets.

“My experience, candidly, is that people who get interested in offsets tend to be early adopters and really care about these things and start making other changes in their lives that reflect the values that brought them to offsets in the first place,” he says.

“Although I am aware of, and always cognizant of the criticism that it will just allow people to pay for their sins and not change their habits, that hasn’t been my experience. I find people who are offsetting are also doing a whole lot of other things.

“It’s one way of articulating your values in respect to carbon. Those people buying offsets are changing their light bulbs, weather-stripping their houses and buying cars with low emissions — it tends to come as a package.”

“The criticism that carbon offsets will just let people buy their way out of consumptive values, that just hasn’t been my experience. It’s like saying if you put in twisty bulbs you’re going to leave your lights on all the time,” reasons Battison.

For nearly a decade, Battison has been working on sustainability at the RMOW. In that time, he’s seen the idea of a carbon calculator come up a few times. When the CAEE money ($15,000-$25,000 per community), was made available earlier this year, he jumped on writing the grant.

“Although we do a fairly good job of inventorying the number of greenhouse gases happening within the community and within our organization, we also model the emissions of folks coming here, which is not surprisingly a lot bigger than what’s happening locally.

“Because it’s primarily visitor driven in our economy, we were looking at ways to add a value-add to the guests, so if they were interested in it they could find real, meaningful rigorous opportunities for reducing their impact.

“When TW suggested… to us at the municipality that they were interested, we decided to partner with them,” Battison says of the project’s background.

Other partners who have come on, at least at this initial phase in a consulting capacity, are the UBC-based offsetters.ca and The Icarus Foundation. These high profile organizations are helping to ensure that a solid foundation is being put into place long before the carbon calculator goes live.

“Right now, for the sake of moving the discussion forward, we’re working with offsetters.ca. It’s the most local organization, based out of UBC. They are quite credible because they are based out of UBC. They are using the gold standard, which we’re very interested in because it’s as credible and rigorous as possible, with third party verification and audits,” explains the municipality’s sustainability manager.

Using a “gold standard” company to purchase offsets from ensures the highest level of voluntary emissions standards, as well as the fact that the money is being used for the project to which it has been pledged. Battison notes that it’s quite possible to buy carbon offsets for $5 a tonne, but cautions, “you get what you pay for.” Most credible offsetting companies charge between $18 and $20 a tonne. But you’ll go a long way before having to spend that $20. Battison estimates that using a gold standard company to offset a round trip flight between Vancouver and Toronto would cost approximately $15.

Comparatively, a trip to Whistler from Oregon, by car, would cost the visitor somewhere between $2 and $5 to offset.

“We know people are willing to pay up to $10,” Battison confirms.

Whether every tourist will be willing to toss in a fin to offset his or her greenhouse gas emissions remains to be seen. However, Battison believes there is the will in the tourism industry to become sustainable. He illustrates his point by mentioning the work of the Icarus Foundation, a Canadian not-for-profit organization committed to carbon-neutral tourism.

“The Icarus Foundation asks how can you keep tourism being an innovator and a leader with respect to environmental innovation. Obviously air travel is a big challenge,” notes Battison.

Ironically, it is in the airline industry where many of the most dramatic innovations are occurring.

“If you’re measuring GHGs intensity per person miles — traveler miles — the airline industry is getting more efficient faster than the general transportation industry. Of course, it’s growing so fast, the growth is outstripping the innovation in an efficiency perspective. Low emission planes are possible… but they’re a long ways off. But we won’t get there fast enough to make the transition without offsets,” he says.

While many who work closely with sustainability err on the side of the dire, Battison remains optimistic, in part, due to what he has witnessed during his tenure with the municipality.

“I’ve definitely seen some big changes during my time here. I see lots of intent for emissions reduction to get more serious as we move forward. Offsets are one of many tools we’re working on in the organization and across the community,” he says.

While the meetings between TW and the RMOW have begun, it will probably be close to a year before any measurable results from the carbon calculator are available.

“The notion is that it would be developed over the course of this fall and early winter and be ready for beta testing in late season,” says Battison. “From my perspective, the sooner the better.”



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