Why Carbon Offsets Backfire
News: With a city motto of "Exclusively Industrial," the town of Vernon was already a pollution magnet. Then offsets made it worse.
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you don't have to leave the United States for an object lesson in how an emissions offset system can go wrong. Consider Vernon, California: The tiny city and its neighboring communities have some of the highest air pollution levels in the Los Angeles basin—and it could get worse because of one of the world's first offset initiatives.
In the early '90s, Southern California implemented a federally mandated offset program for the toxic air contaminants known as particulate matter. As the demand for pollution offsets increased, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which oversees the program, found itself with a tempting option: Instead of holding on to its small quota of offsets set aside for essential services such as schools and fire departments, it could sell them for a healthy profit. With particulate-matter offsets going for $200,000 a pound, the air district stands to rake in about $420 million. Polluters who buy the offsets can save millions over what they would have paid for them on the open market.
Even though Southern California's air pollution levels have been capped, offsets could have a paradoxical effect on the 100 or so residents of Vernon and the mostly Hispanic and low-income residents of surrounding areas. Vernon, whose motto is "Exclusively Industrial," was already a pollution magnet; its city council welcomed just about any facility that wanted to locate there, including a hazardous-waste dump and a metal-processing plant. There are now plans to use pollution offsets to build a 934-megawatt natural-gas-fired power plant there. That's perfectly acceptable within the rules of the offset program, but it means a greater concentration of toxic air pollutants in an already hard-hit area.
"It's as if the local permitting authorities are saying, 'We already have a national sacrifice area in Vernon; a little more wouldn't make any difference,'" says Pat Costner, science adviser to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. Or as Angela Johnson Meszaros, director of policy for the California Environmental Rights Alliance, concludes, "Access to pollution credits means pollution in our communities, period."
Daphne Wysham is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and cohost of Earthbeat Radio.
One extremely key difference between this example and carbon offsets is that carbon dioxide is a global pollutant, so a global cap benefits (or harms) everyone equally. Markets for local and regional pollutants like particulates or mercury need to be designed differently to avoid the problems described here. This sort of problem cannot occur with carbon offsets, because carbon dioxide does not have a local effect.
@ Neil: Your argument makes sense in theory but not in practice. What you are saying is that GHG offsets could allow a company to emit more GHGs, and since other criteria/toxic pollutants are also emitted when GHGs are emitted, allowing offsets allows a concurrent increase in those other pollutants. However, that ignores the fact that those other pollutants are already subjected to heavy regulation under the Clean Air Act, which effectively prevents their increased emission for any reason. If this doesn't make you feel any better, it's also very easy to simply make a rule as part of an offsetting scheme that use of GHG offsets can not permit for any net increase in the emission of other toxic/criteria pollutants. GHG offsets have so many benefits for helping achieve emission reductions that would not otherwise be covered by a cap and trade system or a tax, and it's unfortunate that people are so willing to abandon them because they can't think creatively about how to solve issues like co-pollutants.
There is no substitute for conservation and clean energy.
Vernon is also in the smog belt, cars from all over LA are the primer culprit for any pollution in Vernon.
Um..., because it's a stupid idea primarily aimed at raking in huge sums of cash from companies forced to trade in offsets, and gullible environmentalists who can be convinced that it'll some reduce CO2 emissions overall? That the REAL benefit will be increased wealth among the bureaucrats and government-connected con-men & women who set up the companies that profit from trading in offsets?
That'd be my take on it.
The California offsets in question are in emergency waivers for air polluters -- literally. They regulate particulates, which are a wholly separate type of pollutant, than is CO2. Particulates are known to cause all sorts of health problems, and were regulated long ago, long before CO2 became the policy football that it now is. Don't say one thing, when you mean another.
Particulates are plain old air pollution, and the credits being sold are a license to put out health-damaging substances that cause asthma, exema, pulmonary disease, low white cell counts, and an increased risk of everything from stroke to congestive heart failure.
Emergency waivers are a policy instrument to avoid liability for government-sponsored measures that may at times let such pollutants loose into the air in greater-than-allowed amounts. They apply, for instance, to deciding when the pollution is bad enough to enforce commuter travel restrictions. Selling these waivers to private parties is a perversion of their intended use, as they can't very well serve their original purpose when a company is using them as an excuse to pollute more on a steady basis.
Don't look now, but this is a cash-strapped state looking for any and every means possible, to get a bit of liquidity going, since they don't seem to have enough money at the moment even to budget it.
They'll be selling the public schools, next -- I'm sure some of the same companies that tried (and failed) to run New York's public schools for profit are already lined up outside the Governator's office.
Isn't life a wonder? So many trainwrecks, so little time...
I'll trust that no one meant to deceive, but the effect is the same. Please review your articles before posting, at least for those of your authors who are new or infrequent posters.
The situation expressed in the article above is serious in its own rite, and a mistake like this one just gives legs to those looking for ways to attack.
Please let Nikolai Tesla rest in peace. He was a brilliant and industrious man, but his radiant energy idea has fatal flaws that still make it a foolish waste of energy, as well as a dangerous toy to live around.
Tesla's main enemy was conduction through the atmosphere, the very same phenomenon that made his idea work in the first place. His towers put out an electrical stream that passed, at very high voltage and relatively low amperage, through the air, to (possibly) some device that could make use of the energy, and thence to ground or into the air through that device. The field had to have a tight enough energy curvature that usable energy could be gained from electrodes spaced perhaps a couple of feet apart in the air, or connected to the ground on one pole. The voltage available depended on the distance between the open contacts.
Even if no one used the massive energy his generators put out into the air-ground loop, the energy still flowed; it took almost as much power to drive the system with no one using the power, as it did when power was being well-used, since the generators still had to pump electon flows through the air-ground loop. The generator had to run full-out the whole time.
And it only had a short range, less than a cell-tower's coverage area, if my facts are right. The last years of his life were spent cadging funds to up the coverage by improving the insulation, raising the towers higher (for the same purpose; to prevent air-ground shorts), and increasing the output of his generators, which of course made the insulation problems ever worse. To extend the usable-power range even modestly, one needed massive power increases.
This was the problem Tesla never solved -- because it cannot BE solved, given the air we have on this planet!
And if it did work, would YOU want to live in an electrical field of such close curvature that it sends current from your head to the ground -- or live, work and travel in insulated buildings and cars, and walk around in insulated clothes, afraid to touch anything with your unprotected flesh? We wouldn't need the EPA, either, because there would soon be no nature to protect, with currents running down every tree, every animal's body. Nature electrified; what a glorious dream. Maybe the ASPCA could collect funds to make rubber booties for all the woodland creatures.
But even if we thought that was a price we humans could accept, we would still have to have power-stations every two miles, to make it work like he thought it ought to. Think what THAT would do to the particulate count!
Tesla had many successes, true. Tesla was brilliant, true. Tesla was a man who had one "killer" idea, that he couldn't believe wouldn't work, and it took over his life.
Sorry, but that is the exact definition of a crank.
Please read this comment. Dan Mortensen is right. The story is not factually accurate regarding carbon offsets.
Your journalist confused NOx credits, which are localized and thus can make one area worse than another, with CO2 credits, which are global and can not.
The story needs to be retracted.
Skylar
Ms. Wysham looks very bad as does MJ.
Funny if not so sad.