Speaking Truth to Power: I'm Neutral on Edwards

Global climate change has emerged as one of the most salient issues in the 2008 Presidential election. Politicians sense the need to promote innovative environmental policies, and they're increasingly under pressure to go green themselves - to run carbon neutral campaigns. The Edwards campaign has taken the lead and announced that it will buy carbon offsets to balance any ecological damage produced by its planes, trains, and automobiles. More power to them? Maybe not.

To understand why carbon offsets may be good politics but not such great policy, we need to understand what they are. Carbon offsets take one of two forms. They either subsidize green power, most often solar or wind, or they pay for the planting of trees. In the first case, the purchaser, in effect, uses only clean energy. In the second, even though the purchaser spewed dirty carbon into the air just like the rest of us, he reversed the effect by building a carbon sequestration device (a tree) that will pull all of that carbon back down to earth. Of course, that may take a while, but we've got plenty of time. Those oceans aren't rising any time soon.

In theory, carbon offsets appear a perfect solution. With just a few mouse clicks and ten bucks, a person can balance a flight from Chicago to LA and feel a deep sense of satisfaction. Melting polar ice caps? Droughts? Don't blame me. I paid on the Internet. Carbon offsets allow people, like John Edwards, who happens to live in a 28,000 square foot homes and fly hundreds of thousands of miles a year to appear to balance the damage they do to the environment. Edwards is part of a growing group of celebrity neutrals that includes not only Al Gore and Brad Pitt but also the Rolling Stones and Coldplay. This February, the Academy Awards were carbon neutral and the Olympics and the Super Bowl soon will be. Carbon offsets are the wave of the future for the smart set. You can even offset the carbon produced by your wedding. And you can do it for less than the cost of a Cuisinart.

Buying our way to carbon neutrality seems like a perfect cure. Sadly, I have to share an inconvenient truth. Like most simple solutions to complex problems, the attempt to balance carbon with offsets is more symbolism than substance. Offsets may soothe the consciences of a handful of environmentalists, celebrities, and politicians but they won't scale up. They won't work for everyone. The reason they won't work is because if something seems to be to good to be true, it usually is. In this case, that logic translates into "there's no cheap way to solve an expensive problem." Carbon offsets currently cost so little because land to plant new trees exists in abundance. And new wind farms can be built in sufficient number to produce clean energy that can then be purchased at slightly higher cost. Further, existing wind and solar farms can sell their clean energy as an offset. Someone can even sell existing trees as an offset. Feeling guilty? Go purchase sixty acres of woodlands in some remote area and offset a lifetime spent burning fossil fuels. Ignore the fact that existing clean energy sources and extant forests create no additional reduction in carbon. That's a detail. Just point and click and save the environment.

Reputable carbon offset programs require that the carbon reductions add to what already exists. Even with that constraint, the supply of cheap offsets is sufficient to cover the modest demand. That would no longer be true if everyone tried to buy carbon offsets. If we all went the way of John and Al, then we'd have to balance out all of the carbon that we're spewing into the atmosphere, not just a few puffs of smoke at the margins. To do that, we couldn't just plant a few thousand acres of trees or open a few wind farms. We'd have to retrofit or shut down all of our coal-powered plants. We'd have to switch to more costly sustainable energy sources. We'd have to replace our gas burning cars and trucks with some alternative mode of transportation. And, we'd have to cut way back on air travel. Those fossil fuels that we did use, we'd have to burn in such a way as to sequester the carbon. These changes would be costly.

I'm not saying that carbon offsets wouldn't work if everyone bought them. To the contrary, they'd work exactly like economists would expect them to work: They'd become expensive. When demand goes up, prices go up. Think of it this way. When Bruce Springsteen was just some guy in Jersey with a band, you could go see him for five bucks. Now, a Springsteen concert ticket costs a wee bit more. Why? Because a lot more people want to see Springsteen and there is only so much Bruce to go around. The same logic applies to carbon offsets. For the present, enough cheap offsets exist to keep Hollywood supplied for the foreseeable future, but nowhere near enough exist for everyone. Instead of costing a mere ten bucks per flight, they might cost ten, twenty or even a hundred times as much. Ouch!

So, while it's true, that John Edwards can achieve neutrality for pennies per mile, he can only do so because of the current limited and voluntary market. When we all join in, the shell game becomes apparent. The fact that Edwards and a select few can balance their individual footprints should be seen for what it is: symbolism. Strong effective leaders take symbolic acts. So like many, I'm proud that John Edwards has chosen to go green. However, if he wants to change America, he must speak truth to power: real change will have real costs.