A Big Day Out for Carbon Offsetting
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 01.11.07
Ever observed a snowball as it slowly gathers speed and mass? Starts out small and sickly, and before you know it is massive and unstoppable. Two years ago saying the words “Carbon Neutral” would’ve had peeps look at you askew. But today folk are tripping over themselves to join the throng. Last year it was that mass sporting event, known locally as Aussie Rules Footy, now the summer will ring to the thunderous roar of another carbon neutral mass event: The Big Day Out. A touring music festival that spends a couple months rending the air of cities in Australia and New Zealand. After a couple of energy audits the organisers have worked out their greenhouse gas emission contribution and will spend $30,000 AUD on treeplanting as a carbon compensation. CO2 Australia will manage the offset for them by arranging for the planting of a Malee Eucalyptus tree plantation. In related news BDO will offer recycling stations monitored by a posse of volunteers and the waste removal trucks will be photo ID’d to ensure their collections end up at a recycling depot not the nearest landfill. One sub-venue, LilyWorld, will be solar powered with a punter’s pedal powered complaints stage - the more you grunt the louder your gripe, so they say. Oh, yeh, & we loved their little list of Eco-To-Dos especially no.4. ::Big Day Out, via ABC Online.
See also the deeper green Peat’s Ridge Festival.
I love that everyone is planting trees to offset the carbon they emit through their activities, but am still bothered that people think that planting infant trees of which not all will survive, that take years to mature, and are usually planted in giant monocultures is neutralizing the huge amounts of carbon that they're releasing. A infant tree does not suck up the same amount of CO2 as a mature tree and a monoculture is not a replacement for anold growth forest. Continue planting trees, but do it right and don't think that you’re ever going to be carbon neutral just because you've signed on to a carbon offsetting program.