Are Green Initiatives Making Things Worse?

A new book, Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets (free ebook download), argues that some of our greenest climate initiatives might be doing more harm than good, according to Science Daily.

The authors, Dr. Steffen Böhm and Siddhartha Dabhi of the University of Essex Business School, argue that carbon markets and carbon-offset schemes designed to balance environmental sins in one place with environmental protection and restoration in others are actually providing incentives for major polluters to keep on emitting greenhouse gases.

"Carbon markets simply don't address the underlying and root causes of climate change, which is an over-consumption of finite fossil fuels," the authors said. "It is now time to make up for the lost decade since Kyoto and start to deal with our underlying reliance on fossil fuels."

Böhm and Dabhi also claim that some of the "green" schemes are not as carbon-reducing as they claim to be, throwing their carbon-neutralizing abilities into doubt. The authors advise companies to shrink their carbon footprints by doing carbon projects on their home turf instead of paying someone far away to do it.

The only problem with that logic is that developing countries hold one of the keys to our planet's ability to continue storing carbon -- standing tropical forests. A tree-planting scheme in Connecticut can't hold a carbon candle to a project that protects swaths of virgin rainforest in Brazil. Or can it?

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