Carbon offsetting catches on

Hadi Dowlatabadi is a reformed carbon emitter.

As a scientist who studies climate change, he’s acutely aware of the harmful effects on the environment from human activities that release carbon dioxide in the air, like car and air travel and using electricity.

He used to travel some 100,000 miles a year for scientific meetings, and even owned a sports utility vehicle for all of four days before deciding it wasn’t for him. “I came to my senses,” Dowlatabadi said, adding that he also cut down on travel to see more of his children.

Now, Dowlatabadi works largely out of his home in Vancouver, B.C., using the phone and giving talks by videoconference. He also helped start a Web site, www.offsetters.com, that allows people to figure out how much CO2 emissions their car or air travel is causing and put money toward clean-energy and other environmentally friendly programs to reduce C02 emissions elsewhere.

Using these and other ways to “offset” one’s carbon emissions is becoming a big thing these days.

London-based HSBC claims that it became the first major bank last year to offset all of its carbon emissions; Swiss Re, a major reinsurance company based in Zurich, says it will do the same by 2013. Former vice president-turned-environmentalist Al Gore says he offsets all of the emissions that he and his wife Tipper are responsible for, and the Dave Matthews Band is about to announce that it will make donations to green causes to offset all the carbon emissions caused by the travel and energy use from its tours going back to 1991.

Here’s how carbon offsetting works. Dowlatabadi figures that a small car such as a Honda Civic, driven the average of 12,000 miles a year, would produce about 3.5 tons of carbon dioxide in a year.

By putting money toward renewable energy sources, paying for more efficient cooking stoves in developing countries or other green activities, you can “offset” an equal amount of CO2 emissions. Offset everything you do, as Gore and others do, and you can reach the goal of becoming “carbon-neutral.”

To be sure, the amounts of CO2 actually being reduced by such offsetting activities are puny compared to the vast amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from industrial activities globally, and achieving meaningful cutbacks in global emissions remains an enormous task.

To some environmentalists, the idea of paying to compensate for one’s carbon emissions has inherent dangers of its own, especially if it merely serves as a moral salve to atone for driving a gas-guzzler.

“If it is helpful in serving to educate people about the carbon impacts of their activity, that would be useful,” said Dan Becker, director of the global warming program at the Sierra Club, the oldest and largest grass-roots environmental organization in the country.

“But if instead people view it as a way to avoid the guilt for acting wrongly, then it would be counterproductive,” Becker said. “People shouldn’t see ‘carbon neutral’ as a papal indulgence to allow them to continue to pollute.”

Nonetheless, some say it’s a hopeful sign that companies and prominent individuals are setting an example.

“At this point it’s basically symbolic, but the goal is to build a groundswell to get countries to do something about this,” says M. Granger Morgan, head of the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa.