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Benjamin McKeown

A complete guide to carbon offsetting | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...fset-projects-carbon-emissions

climate change consequences management carbon offsetting

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 28 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Carbon offset schemes allow individuals and companies to invest in environmental projects around the world in order to balance out their own carbon footprints.
  • designed to reduce future emissions
  • energy technologies or purchasing and ripping up carbon credits from an emissions trading scheme.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • oaking up CO2 directly from the air through the planting of trees.
  • Some people and organisations offset their entire carbon footprint while others aim to neutralise the impact of a specific activity, such as taking a flight
  • visits an offset website, uses the online tools to calculate the emissions of their trip, and then pays the offset company to reduce emissions elsewhere in the world by the same amount – thus making the flight "carbon neutral".
  • £8/$12 for each tonne of CO2 offset
  • carbon neutrality included as part of the price.
  • most of the best-known carbon offset schemes have long-since switched from tree planting to clean-energy projects – anything from distributing efficient cooking stoves through to capturing methane gas at landfill sites.
  • many people argue that offsetting is unhelpful – or even counterproductive – in the fight against climate change
  • Just as indulgences allowed the rich to feel better about sinful behaviour without actually changing their ways, carbon offsets allow us to "buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction"
  • "Our guilty consciences appeased, we continue to fill up our SUVs and fly round the world without the least concern about our impact on the planet … it's like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it."
  • "a positive approach to offsetting could have public resonance well beyond the CO2 offset, and would help to build awareness of the need for other measures."
  • This boils down not just to the effectiveness of the project at soaking up CO2 or avoiding future emissions. Effectiveness is important but not enough. You also need to be sure that the carbon savings are additional to any savings which might have happened anyway.
  • The carbon savings would only be classified as additional if the project managers could demonstrate that, for the period in which the carbon savings of the new lightbulbs were being counted, the recipients wouldn't have acquired low-energy bulbs by some other means.
  • The problem is that it's almost impossible to prove additionality with absolute certainly, as no one can be sure what will happen in the future,
  • If that happened, the bulbs distributed by the offset company would cease to be additional, since the energy savings would have happened even if the offset project had never happened.
  • To try and answer these questions, the voluntary offset market has developed various standards, which are a bit like the certification systems used for fairly traded or organic food
  • Voluntary Gold Standard (VGS) and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS).
  • One VGS-certified biomass power plant refused to allow her around, though staff there reported a number of concerns such as trees being chopped down and sold to the plant, which was designed to run on agricultural wastes.
  • f we're to tackle climate change, they argue, the projects being rolled out by offset companies should be happening anyway, funded by governments around the world, while companies and individuals reduce their carbon footprints directly.
  • Only in this way – by doing everything possible to make reductions everywhere, rather than polluting in one place and offsetting in another – does the world have a good chance of avoiding runaway climate change, such critics claim.
  • some carbon-neutrality advocates suggest offsetting carbon-intensive activities such as flights two or three or even ten times ove
  • The point is simply that the world is full of inexpensive ways to reduce emissions. In theory, if enough people started offsetting, or if governments started acting seriously to tackle global warming, then the price of offsets would gradually rise, as the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings – the easiest and cheapest "quick wins" – would get used up.
Benjamin McKeown

The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...r-reef-a-catastrophe-laid-bare

coasts reefs

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 29 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • In 2011-12 it was estimated tourism centred on the Great Barrier Reef generated $5.7bn for the economy and created 69,000 jobs.
  • Recent experience in Australia had shown that negative commentary about the status of world heritage properties impacted on tourism.”
  • he twin perils brought by climate change – an increase in the temperature of the ocean and in its acidity – threaten its very existence.”
Benjamin McKeown

How Successful Were the Millennium Development Goals? A Final Report | New Security Beat - 0 views

www.newsecuritybeat.org/...development-goals-final-report

MDG

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • “despite many successes, the poorest and most vulnerable people are being left behind.”
  • eport calls for better data collection practices to create a post-2015 development agenda that can overcome the MDG’s shortcomings.
  • number of people living in extreme poverty and proportion of undernourished people in developing regions has declined by more than half since 1990,
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  • The maternal mortality ratio has declined by 45 percent worldwide, and the proportion of the global population using an improved drinking water source rose from 76 percent to 91 percent
  • Those still left out, however, are increasingly concentrated in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and all across the globe, women and young people face the highest odds of living in poverty
  • Conflict and displacement is taking a toll as well.
  • While hunger has fallen in most areas, projections indicate that the prevalence of undernourishment in the Middle East will rise by 32 percent between 2014 and 2016 due to war, civil unrest, and increasing numbers of refugees.
  • Progress in maternal health is sharply divided along rural-urban lines
  • marginalized and easily forgotten amidst promising overall trends. “Millions of people are being left behind, especially the poorest and those disadvantaged because of their sex, age, disability, ethnicity, or geographic location,”
  • We need to tackle root causes and do more to integrate the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development,
  • “employment opportunities have diminished in both developing and developed regions
  • he employment-to-population ratio, which measures what percentage of the working population is employed, has declined around the world since 1990 with the biggest drops in East and South Asia.
  • rapid urbanization is taxing already-inadequate infrastructure. The proportion of the urban population living in slums in developing regions fell from 39 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in 2014, surpassing the MDG target. However, the total number of urban residents living in slums continues to grow as a result of accelerating urbanization and population growth
  • Population growth and increased consumption have also stressed the environment, presenting challenges that overshadow progress on the seventh MDG
  • While ozone-depleting substances have nearly been eliminated since 1990 and the ozone layer is expected to recover by midcentury, carbon dioxide emissions have risen by more than 50 percent in the past 25 years
  • Between 1998 and 2011, the number of countries experiencing water stress increased from 36 to 41. Water scarcity currently affects more than 40 percent of the world population, a statistic that is only projected to increase.
  • For the global poor whose livelihoods are directly tied to natural resources and suffer the most from environmental degradation, climate change hinders development in other sectors. That’s why environmental change is a much bigger focus in the Sustainable Development Goals, set to be adopted later this year.
Benjamin McKeown

The effects of subsidies | Global Subsidies Initiative - 0 views

www.iisd.org/...effects-subsidies

subsidies resources

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • the benefits to society of that money, if it had been spent otherwise, or left in the pockets of taxpayers, might have been even greater.
  • heory shows that these depend on a number of factors, among which are the responsiveness of producers and consumers to changes in prices (what economists call the own-price elasticities of supply and demand), the form of the subsidy, the conditions attached to it, and how the subsidy interacts with other policies.
  • such subsidies tend to divert resources from more productive to less productive uses, thus reducing economic efficiency.
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  • Those who take a more benign view argue that subsidies can serve redistributive goals, or can help to correct market failures. But, as the public-finance economist Ronald Gerritse once warned, subsides defended on such grounds "may have externalities that we did not bargain for." Indeed it is such second-order effects that have come under attack by environmental economists in recent years.
  • any subsidies are defended as benefiting disadvantaged groups, or groups the politicians like to make us believe are disadvantaged.
  • tend to favour larger producing units. Recently, for example, the Environmental Working Group, an American non-profit organization, counted up all the direct payments made by the U.S. Government to farmers between 1994 and 2005 and found that ten percent of subsidy recipients collected 73 percent of all subsidies, amounting to $120.5 billion Analyses of agricultural support programmes in other countries appear to lend credence to the 80:20 rule - the impression that 80% of support goes to 20% of the beneficiaries.
  • environmentally harmful subsidies" they generally mean subsidies that support production, transport or consumption that ends up damaging the environment. The environmental consequences of subsidies to extractive industries are closely linked to the activity being subsidized, like fishing or logging.
  • Subsidies to promote offshore fishing are a commonly cited example of environmentally harmful subsidies, with support that increases fishing capacity (i.e., subsidies toward constructing new boats) linked to the depletion of important fishery stocks. In other industries, subsidies that promote consumption or production have led to higher volumes of waste or emissions. For example, irrigation subsidies often encourage crops that are farmed intensively, which in turn leads to higher levels of fertilizer use than would occur otherwise. Moreover, irrigation subsidies can lead to the under pricing of irrigated water, which in turn fosters the overuse and inefficient use of water. While many subsidies have unintended negative consequences on the environment, well designed subsidies can be beneficial when they work to mitigate an environmental problem. In the context of fisheries, for instance, these would include subsidies to management programs that help ensure that fisheries resources are appropriately managed and that regulations are enforced, or to research and development (R&D) designed to promote less environmentally destructive forms of fish catching and processing.    
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