An argument goes up in smoke

I'm the sort of bloke who spends spare time reading about this and that. Nothing strange about it, but the 'this' and that I refer to is hardly entertaining. I like reading about obscure projects, products, reviews. I also follow cars across the world. One of the things being thrown about like rubbish out of a house in the Yewnited States of America is being carbon neutral. Never before has being neutral been so much in vogue.

I had seen the term being thrown around quite a bit over the past few years and I thought it was one of those crazy green things like you pay to have a sapling planted in the Amazon rain forest if you fart in the UK or something like that. Turns out it's that and a lot more. Pretty complex stuff this. To cut a long story short, there is a company that finds guys/gals who don't fart much and hooks them up with more gassy individuals and makes a tidy sum in between. One sets off the other and all that sort of thing. However, I'm not in the mood to cut long stories short and hence you get the whole 9 yards.

Let's start by setting the scene here. Person A, living in the UK wants to do the following:

• drive a car
• take a train
• drink coffee
• not freeze to death
• take a holiday
• switch on a light
• use the toilet
• watch TV
• use a bicycle (yes, cycling is not pollution free, not according to these nutters. The cycle is manufactured in a CO2 belching factory and talking of belching, I would say they've even successfully measured how much CO2 we emit while puffing and panting our way up a hill).
• you get the drift. 

Any activity performed by human beings is now contributing to global warming (err, sorry Climate Change) because we all emit tonnes and tonnes of CO2 each year and we're heating the place up (please don't ask me why London is still so cold, I do not know). Wanting to do something about climate change is a very noble and essential thought. Sure going green costs money and sure, it's not an easy thing to do.

Coming back to our case, getting Mr. A to be carbon neutral.

Scheme 1: The beginning

In the case above, person A would, in order to rectify the harm caused to the environment, walk/ride/drive/swim/fly down to the nearest IKEA, get a sapling, for a round sum of £15, that has been flown into the UK from Timbuktu and plant it in his garden. That sapling would then be tended to by A and in around 20 years become a tree that eats up CO2 and spits out Oxygen.

However, apart from IKEA, which flew the sapling in from T'tu no one else makes a profit. In steps the carbon trader Z, who, would tell Mr. A that in exchange for a 'paltry' £30, she will contact her middleman Y in United States, who would contact his middleman X in Mexico, who would contact his middleman W in Brazil, who will contact a farmer friend of his, a Mr. Poor Farmer, to plant a sapling in the Amazon rainforest, which would immediately offset the carbons emitted by A for the next 3 generations. Mr. A is very happy, feels his farsightedness has saved the planet and goes about smugly driving a gas guzzler to the grocery shop, which is around the corner. Mr. A need not worry about tending to the sapling, he need not worry about protecting the sapling from random creatures eating the tree that is supposed to save 3 generations of his, or from other random farmers clearing the very bit of forest this sapling has been planted in. He's paid money for something and has delegated his responsibility.

Scheme 2: Evolution

This went on for a while and then our friendly neighbourhood carbon trader Mr. Z saw her income drop, there were too many new entrants jumping onto the trading bandwagon, which pushed prices down and there is only so much of the Amazon that can be replanted without it resembling a paddy field.

One day, Ms. Z met her wizardly f(r)iends in the financial services sector, the ones that deal with derivatives and swaps. Soon after she saw them, she came back to her house and found it smelling of food that she had forgotten to put in the freezer. She immediately whipped out her can of room freshener and lo and behold! The smell vanished!

Ms. Z didn't come first in her university for no reason; she quickly put two and two together and came with the answer. Not four, but twenty two. Thinking out of the box and all that fancy stuff.

She jumped onto the internet and found a news item on Google about this factory in China, belonging to Hu Plc that suddenly became environmentally conscious and had replaced all its internal combustion power plants by thousands of labourers using a bicycle pump to blow air into a turbine, which would spin to generate electricity to power the factory (there was no green intention to the move, 1000 labours worked out cheaper than 1000 tonnes of coal, so the switch was made). She called that factory, rustled up the 5 words of Mandarin she had googled before the call and convinced them to calculate how much of CO2 they saved. They came up with a random number, let's say 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year. This made our heroine Z a happy camper.

She got busy with all her contacts, including our very own Mr. A and told them, "Earlier, you paid me money to do something, now I refuse to do anything. However, I do know a company that is doing something about the environment. Hu Plc is a responsible corporate. Realising they are polluting the environment, they have taken concrete, bold and pioneering steps to reduce their carbon footprint. Having invested millions of dollars in reducing their carbon emissions, they are keen in passing on any benefit they get from saving the environment. They have agreed to set off the saving they have achieved in carbon emissions against the CO2 you continue to irresponsibly emit by driving your car all over the country. So if you pay me £100 per year per car, in lieu of the CO2 you are emitting, I will use that money to buy carbon credits from Hu Plc, who, in essence are willing to bear the blame for YOUR pollution!" she finished with a tear in her eye.

Mr. A was suitably impressed by the fact that someone else now bears his cross and pays up. Z then pays Hu Plc a grand sum of £40 for the trouble it is taking to be named in the scheme. Z's profit had just shot up from £9.95 (£15 from Scheme 1, less commissions to Y in the US, X, W of £5, £0.2 each to the blokes in Mexico and Brazil, less £0.1 to Mr. Poor Farmer who actually planted the sapling) to a grand sum of £60. Hu Plc was very happy as it had not only saved money on not using coal, it had a 1000 labourers to exploit and also this dumb person Z from UK who thought the whole scheme was designed for environment friendliness and paid £40 for it! As for Mr. A, he was even happier than scheme 1 because his CO2 emissions were taken care of immediately as opposed to 20 years in the future, so he can continue to pollute and better still, not get affected by it, because someone else was not polluting for him! Win-win situation.

Scheme 3: The present

Scheme 2 seemed a good racket and Z saw money pouring into her coffers. More people starting the same racket didn't seem to affect profits adversely since more people were buying into the premise that getting someone else to be responsible for them was better than them having to take responsibility. However, the government and regulators didn't seem to be very helpful and insisted that the carbons NOT emitted be audited and checked to ensure that if a million tonnes was saved, not more than a million tonnes of carbon credit was sold on to offset not more than a million tonnes. In other words, supply of carbon credit became limited, which restricted sales. This pushed prices up, which was good, but profits were not adequate since the cost also went up. Z, after all, had a lifestyle to fund. She had become used to this lifestyle.

The next Eureka! moment for Z came when she had gone to the shoe shop for a spot of shopping.

As she used her credit card to pay for the £5,000 Gucci shoes she had just bought, she thought about when her credit card bill was due and if she needed to move some money around in the next few weeks to ensure money was in her account to pay the bill.

Then it hit her. "Of course, I use my credit card to buy things with money I don't have right now. I use future income to pay for my present lifestyle!" she thought. "In the same way, if I find a company that is GOING to invest in becoming green, I can use the carbon they are GOING to not be emitting and sell it to the losers who want to pollute more now!" She hurried home clutching her Gucci pumps, all the while drafting the next killer argument to put forward to the likes of Mr. A...so began her love affair with Carbon Futures trading, a scheme which not only generated a ton of money, but also removed the problem of limited supply of carbon credits. Pay for the present with the future. Win-win situation all over again!

The end.

I am all for going green and helping companies that genuinely want to go green for the good of the environment. We owe it ourselves and our future generations to save the precious planet we are in. We only have one place we can call home and that one place is increasingly becoming a hostile place to live, and that is largely due to us. However, I do not believe the solution is for ordinary citizens to simply pay money to pass on the responsibility of getting something done. That way we are just passing the buck around and not enough people do things for the betterment of the Earth. Saving the planet is an individual responsibility. We all have to play our part in it. If Mr. A planted the tree himself, he would feel attached to the tree, guard it from predators and ensure he does his darn best to see it grow into a large tree that helps clean up the environment around the very area he is polluting. If he pays someone to do it for him, the responsibility is just not there. It only shifts the onus of doing something to someone else. That, is my humble opinion.