Paying for One's "Carbon Sins" May Cost Pennies
by Karin Kloosterman, Jerusalem, Israel on 02.25.08
We are all becoming more eco-conscious, right? We might not exactly be following in the footsteps of No Impact Man or be as Green as a Thistle, but we're trying. Eating organic food is important to us, as is eating locally.
Thanks to a UK initiative, measuring one's carbon impact is destined to be less of an elusive question. The UK-based Carbon Trust is working to calculate the carbon footprint (CO2e) of common consumer items. And after a year and a half, some numbers are in: the carbon dioxide emissions created in making a bag of chips "Walkers crisps" from the cradle to the grave, is double the actual weight of the chips.
Is that a lot or a little?
That's the question Carbon Catablog asked last week. And with a quick calculation based on standard carbon offset prices in the UK, the results are pretty surprising.
If a 34.5g bag of Walkers chips (the cheese and onion flavor) costs the environment 75g in CO2e to produce, Carbon Catalog calculated that it would cost the UK consumer a grand total of 0.075 pence (that's about 1.5 cents U.S. ) to offset the carbon produced by the chips.
Here's how the carbon offset price was calculated.
Breaking it down:
A 34.5g bag of Walker’s chips produces 75g of CO2e.
Carbon Trust factored in the carbon impact of fertilizers used in the field to grow the potatoes (yes, they use real vegetables in chips!) all the way to disposal of the bag in landfill.
The 75 grams translate to 0.000 075 tons of CO2e. If in the UK the average cost to offset a ton of CO2e is £10, then the grand total cost to offset your chips equals ... are you ready? A whole 0.075 pence.
Seems negligible. While the carbon footprint of something complicated like a pizza will be more difficult to assess and possibly more expensive to offset, the Carbon Trust eventually plans to get there one product at a time. Maybe (hopefully) one day, a carbon label will be as ubiquitous as 'made from recycled materials' or bio-organic labels.
Interesting, but I always thought that offsets were inexpensive only because the current programs tend to fund low hanging fruit type projects. If we were offset every single product and activity, is it possible that we'd oversaturate the offsets market?
And who gets the benefit of these few pennies? What an incredible waste of time. Soon they will counting the times we fart and charge us for each one. You will never extract any money from me for anything like this. How insane are we becoming.
The short answer is, yes. There can only be so many carbon offsetting projects. At some point, it will be impossible to add more carbon reduction capacity to the mix. Couple that with the fact that many of the projects that the offsets fund would be have been completed without the offsets, then the overall effectiveness of the concept is in question. Basing the analysis on offset market value is not a true representation of the overall environmental costs of the carbon released.
You monetary conversion math is off by a factor of 10. 0.075 pence is 0.15 us cents (or just under 1/5 of a US penny), which makes this even cheaper.
If more people want offset I wonder how much it will increase in price.
Offset a ton of CO2e is £10, its way to cheap. The marginal damage is beyond value and of infinite cost, then the amount to offset the CO2 is infinite, if we want to decarbonise the economy!
Read Climate code red.
http://www.carbonequity.info/climatecodered/index.html
It does seem the effort would be much better spent just getting on with enacting comprehensive caps or taxes... that way the cost of the carbon will be embedded in the price.
It's already time consuming enough to read all the ingredient lists trying to determine whether it contains chunks that are likely to lodge in one's arteries... now we're supposed to add up all the grams of CO2 in our cart. And it's not as if there is going to be any great revelation from this info... anything without meat is going to be way lower than those containing meat. Switching from chips to crackers or bread to tortillas is likely to have negligible effect compared to how much meat/dairy is included in one's diet... no? Though maybe THAT will be the revelation to some.
Likewise, there could potentially be negative psychological aspects to this. Take bottled water... huge environmental (and monetary) waste overall in developed countries. Yet, the amount of CO2 that would be listed on an individual bottle would probably make it seem pretty inconsequential. At $20/ton or even $80/t, the CO2 would probably only add up to a couple of cents at most.... which might take peoples' minds off the bigger picture.