Politicians, jet-setting celebrities, and Bono would have you believe that it’s OK to hop on a plane and fly halfway around the world on a regular basis if each time you do so you employ some dodgy foreign company to plant a few quid’s worth of trees for you in Africa somewhere.
The equation goes something like:
| Plane burns fossil fuel: | + carbon dioxide |
| New trees make oxygen: | - carbon dioxide |
| = carbon neutral |
It is, of course, a complete and total scam. It’s based on a statistical fudge which works by only looking at a very narrow time frame, whilst ignoring other factors.
For the purposes of these calculations, a tree can be though of as a carbon “store” - whilst alive, the net product is carbon dioxide is taken from the air and converted to oxygen, which is released back into the air, and carbon, from which the tree is made.
When a tree dies, it’ll likely either be burnt, or rot, each of which reverses the process and combines the stored carbon with oxygen to produce the unfriendly greenhouse gasses that we fear so much.
Fossilised trees retain their carbon in the form of oil, coal or gas, until such time as these are burnt.
In each case, the net effect can indeed be considered “carbon neutral”.
The problem with burning fossil fuels is that the equation acts over millions of years.
The carbon dioxide released from them has been stored over a huge period of time, but has all been re-released into the atmosphere in the past 200 years or so. That’s the problem.
Planting some trees won’t suck it all back away again.
So anyway, having debunked the idea of carbon offsetting, let’s go back to the political equation:
flying + carbon offsetting = OK
Where we’ve already seen that carbon offsetting has no useful effect, so the equation can be re-written in the following form, which is what they’re actually telling you:
Carbon offsetting = pointless,
Flying = OK
So what was all the fuss about in the first place?
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