As a few of you probably already know, I am using a car to go to work from my home in Zurich to Baden. This for a main reason, it’s faster than using the train. By public transportation, the trip lasts 1 hour door to door, one way, while using the car it lasts just 30 minutes. At the end of the day, literally, I am gaining 1 hour. But of course, by car I am less environmental friendly than using public transportation, which I am aware of.
Browsing the net, I stumbled upon the website of a Switzerland-based company, myclimate.org, active in the domain of climate protection and CO2 compensations. The idea is quite interesting and simple: try to get environmental friendly by avoiding carbon emissions, while buying carbon credits for the emissions that cannot, for some reason, be avoided. The collected money is then invested in projects around the world, which aim at reducing the carbon emissions, e.g. the construction of a wind park in Egypt, which will avoid using a coal plant for producing electricity.
So here we go. I calculated the CO2 emission caused by my car use for going to work, which corresponds to about 11′000 Km a year with a car consuming 7 l/100 Km. This gives 2.35 tons of CO2 a year. Not kidding! Although there is just 25 Km between my home and work place, it gets to 2.35 tons! The majority of CO2 weight comes form the oxygen atoms, which come from the air. That’s the reason why 770 l of fuel produces 2.35 tons of CO2. At the end, I bought the carbon credits, which is a good thing, I think, but should not restrain from living, or trying to live, more climate neutral.
September 3rd, 2007 at 9:25 pm
I might be a bit of a cynic but how is that different from the Catholic Church’s indulgence system of the old days ?
I am sure they are doing good things with the money and it’s a good thing to donate, but I don’t like the idea of paying to excuse your non-neutral-carbon sins.
Basically the idea is that since we live a rich country we afford the luxury of polluting and can invest some money to ensurer poorer people, elsewhere, won’t enjoy this polluting luxury.
The carbon you emitted really got emitted, Paying for it not to happen elsewhere doesn’t remove it here.
I hope you feel horribly guilty now that you heard all this criticism from someone who secretly hates the planet
September 3rd, 2007 at 10:47 pm
Yeah, I guess you are a bit right. Basically you pay so that this money is invested somewhere else in order for someone else not to polute. At the end of the day, there is still carbon dioxyde in the air. Even though we could consider that if you had not bought the carbon credit and not emitted that quantity, the same quantity would have been emitted anyway.
But I agree that we should restrain from carbon emissions in the first place.
Nevertheless I find the idea interesting that you try to clean up your mess. You are not just doing something, period. You think about the impact of what you are doing, try to diminish them, and those you cannot avoid for some reason, you clean up the mess it produces. So at the end, in the price for doing something gets included the price for cleaning the mess it does.