Tuesday, March 13, 2007

 

Carbon neutral?



Ever wondered what it means when politicians, celebrities etc claim to have offset carbon emitions? Well I have just come across this very balanced and interesting article in the Guardian. Some key quotes:

"There are now at least 15 companies in this country catering to people who volunteer to off set the carbon emissions of flights; the rest of the world manages just 29. A year ago, 20 people per week were offsetting flights through the website of one British firm, the CarbonNeutral Company. Today, it’s 200 per week."

"local people were being thrown off the land to make way for new forests, which were sometimes non-native trees in monoculture plantations and hence disastrous for local ecology. "

"As if to underline the point, this year journalists discovered that the Coldplay forest in India was not exactly blooming: 40 per cent of the trees had died, with villagers saying they had been given no funds for irrigation or fertiliser (although other forestry projects paid for by Coldplay elsewhere may have done better)."

 "The CarbonNeutral Company, the firm responsible for that campaign and for most of the celebrity planting schemes, now accepts that trees aren’t the best way of tackling climate change, but argues they were a useful way to get customers interested in the early days"

The article can be found at :
http://travel.guardian.co.uk/article/2006/dec/10/ethicalholidays.escape#more-article





# posted by Rob @ 10:47 am
Comments:
Hello Rob,

Thought you might like to check out your most local flight offset option.
Visit us here:
http://www.treeflights.com/

Thanks.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : 11:29 am
 
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