JOIN USCarbon offsets are a fraudulent way to buy yourself a green certificate
Carbon offsets are the new buzzword. Are you an individual taking an international flight, but worried about your carbon emissions? Purchase a carbon offset – pay a little extra for someone to plant a tree in a distant forest. What if you’re a company that relies on a coal plant for energy? You can pay an indigenous community for their work in protecting the rainforest. They get the credit and the income, while you can cancel out your bad karma.
Offsets can happen in other ways, too. If you’re the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, intent on cutting trees across the city to create more roads, flyovers, underpasses, metro lines – you can offset the negative impact by promising to plant two saplings for each tree you cut. If you’re feeling especially ambitious, you can even promise to plant ten saplings.
No one seems to check if these promises are actually fulfilled. Do those vast acres of rainforest supposedly regenerated by the global carbon market really exist? A recent investigative report by the The Guardian, the German magazine Die Zeit, and an investigative journalists unit called SourceMaterial, states that more than 90% of the rainforest offsets claimed by Verra, the world’s largest non-profit programme that provides carbon offset credits, do not exist on ground. This is bad news for companies like Disney, which has rapidly expanded its cruise ships (which burn a lot of carbon) – in part by investing in carbon offsets – or Shell, which runs a campaign to help people in the UK drive “carbon-neutral” petrol-burning cars by offsetting their emissions via planting trees in other countries – including ones close by such as Scotland, and others located far away, such as Peru or Indonesia. Climate change activists deride such strategies, using a simple, catchy slogan – Keep It In The Ground. The best way to mitigate climate change, they say, is to stop burning fossil fuels. Hence the student movement which has been so successful in many American universities, pushing them to divest their funds from fossil fuel investments. No offsets, they demand.
If the several million saplings that were promised to be planted in Bengaluru to offset various infrastructure projects over the past 20 years were added up, the city should be awash in green. Yet, the city continues to choke on smog. Fifty-four large trees were cut down in the first week of January near the palace, to widen the road. Another 50 mature trees will be destroyed to make way for a flyover on Sankey Road – despite strenuous protests by local residents, and an online petition that has gathered close to 17,500 signatures in just a few weeks. Meanwhile, 174 trees at Yeshwanthpur railway station will be removed to make way for “redevelopment”, and KR Puram will lose another 74 trees. More than 1,000 trees will also go soon, making way for a suburban railway project, unless the powers-that-be change their minds.
Small wonder that a recent Supreme Court judgement on Chandigarh added a stern warning that the city needed to avoid becoming another Bengaluru, clearly marking out Karnataka’s capital as a classic instance of bad environmental planning. The court urged policymakers to conduct serious environmental impact assessments before permitting any urban development projects to go ahead.
But none of that seems to make a difference to namma ooru Bengaluru. Neither the disapproval of its citizens, nor the recent judgement of the Supreme Court. The rising smog in the city, the respiratory disorders of its residents – especially the children and the elderly, the extreme heat waves that plague Bengaluru in summer, the loss of its iconic wooded streets – none of this ‘sentimental claptrap’ holds any value against the seductive pleasure – and hard economic cash – to be found in road-widening and infrastructure projects. After all, there is always the hope that bad karma can be negated – through carbon offsets that lie only in Excel spreadsheets and paper graphs. We would all do well to abide by the maxim of the physician instead -- “First, do no harm.”