I just read an interesting article on The Independent, about an ethical travel company who has decided to drop their carbon footprint offset scheme. His company responsibletravel.com used a company called Climate Care to let customers purchase carbon offsets; that company would use schemes in the developing world to offset carbon use.
The thing that bugs me isn’t that his dropped them because he was worried customers would just take it as a cost, and not really do anything about their carbon footprints, but that that company (and presumably others) used schemes in the third/developing world to do so.
What is wrong with this country? We have oodles of space where trees can be planted. If you take a look at the moors, our mountainous areas, Scotland, islands off our coast, these all have places to plant trees. What about other schemes like providing literature to small/medium businesses on how they can reduce their carbon use? I heard a few weeks back of a company that produces no waste because the owner recycled everything, and in the course of that got fined by the local council because they thought he was doing something wrong (read: illegal?).
Perhaps this is the problem with carbon offsetting. We get used to dumping our problems on the third/developing world, so we do the same with our carbon problems. Supposedly the market for carbon in Europe is worth £81Bn – I wonder how much of that the third/developing world actually sees?
If I could get the funding I’d create a company to do just that, buy land here in the UK and plant trees, or plant trees on government (unused) land. No doubt our lovely government would consider that a waste. Anything less than a few billion is useless, after all. If they can afford £1.5 Trillion (yes, that’s a ‘t’) for bank bailouts and the economic mess, surely they can afford a few Billion to plant trees?
Tags: carbon, carbon clear, carbon footprint, carbon offset, climate care, ethical travel company, responsible travel