Web Letters: Don't Bet on Offsets

The idea of a magazine like The Nation devoting both its print space and intellectual resource to bashing an industry that might be part of the solution to the climate crisis is saddening. The authors take a new industry that has great potential to help solve the climate crisis and narrow in on the few mistakes and problems facing this growing industry. This type of thinking and writing is what we are bombarded with daily by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and those uninterested in intelligent discourse. Is the offset market perfect in its present incarnation? No, and you won’t find anyone working in the offset industry who thinks it is.

A responsible article would have examined the role offsets can have in funding truly additional CO₂ mitigation projects, raising awareness of global warming, and stimulating the public discourse we need to bring about effective political and economic change. We at NativeEnergy acknowledge the limitations of offsets as a solution--offsets are only one of many needed--and encourage the efforts of everyone working for climate solutions. There a plenty of good people working to make the offset industry a better more effective tool to fight climate change. Offsets can play a part in moving us towards climate solutions. We hope The Nation can as well.

Tom Stoddard
NativeEnergy, LLC

Lincoln, Vermont

More loose thinking and sensationalism around the subject of offsets. It's a shame--offsets are not not the whole answer, or a "get out of jail free" card, but giving the impression that it's all just a fraud (in spite of the evidence to the contrary) gets people out of some very good practices:

1) actually offsetting their CO2--a practice that removes the exact pollutant we're concerned about from the atmosphere, and something I wish could be extended to other pollutants.

2) spending money for no selfish return--acknowledging the need to spend to make things better

3) starting the industries/awareness/cash flow that can be leveraged for even greater action in the future

4) actually DOING something after installing the swirly bulb

The article takes the first-ver Consumers' Guide to Offsets and instead of pointing to the good companies and the fact that now for the first time there's a guide to help individuals make even better offsetting choices it points to the bad companies, and vaguely implies that their lack of controls guarantees a great fraud.

It also makes disgraceful statements like this :"Then there are deeper questions about the very idea of offsetting. The December 2006 study of the offset industry suggested that consumers are getting bamboozled."

This is something worthy of Karl Rove--it looks like it makes sense if you read it quickly but it doesn't at all. Consumers being 'bamboozled' is the misleading and destructive tenor of the whole piece, and is not a new point. The new point made here is that there are "deeper questions about the very idea of offsetting." The article has absolutely no substantiation of this. Still, 95 percent of readers will come away with the idea that "deeper questions" exist--when they either do not, or they have not read anything at all about them.

In fact, offsets and a market for CO2 are an essential part of pretty much every recommended approach to combating climate change. They are already funneling money to highly significant, additional/incremental actions all over the world. This is money that would not otherwise have flowed, or would have flowed so slowly through government hands that we might as well not have bothered.

The Consumers' Guide is a great answer to consumer "bamboozlement," and something that their article could have helped clarify and take a step further. Instead they decided to deceive and paint fuzzy pictures about some systematic fraud or failure that just doesn't exist. 100,000 people will then turn off the idea of offsets and this form of personal action for no good reason.

Way to go.

Quentin S Prideaux
Alder Associates

Wellesley, MA