Shocking: Only 1% of US airlines sell CO2 Offsets: Only 24 out of 374 world wide airlines offer a carbon off-set policy
Nov 28th, 2007 by Richard
Their toys are some of the most technologically advanced on earth; They’re custodians of the safest form of travel known to man and their concern for your well being is so sincere that they’ll even get a pretty girl to show you how to secure your belt. And despite the heavy conscience and wizzy technology, these guys don’t appear too concerned about the fate of our planet.
According to the European commission airlines are responsible for 3% of the global C02 emissions. Considering this, a new report issued today by e-photoframes (a premier eco business) goes beyond shocking. Of 374 listed airlines, only 24 offer passengers the opportunity to clean up the CO2 emissions from their flights by offering carbon offsets for sale. Self service cleaning (fortunately a policy not yet extended to the toilet, or gangway) is a start, but cleaning up your own mess? Only one single airline in the English speaking world has taken the plunge: A seaplane operator from Canada.
The survey looked at the carbon offset policies published on each airline’s website in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and India. Now make sure your seat is upright and you’re strapped in: The US has 175 airlines with listed websites but only 2 of them sell carbon offsets! The UK is currently top of the class with 16% of airlines offering offsets (including all the big ones). India has 18 airlines listed without a single offset policy among them. Frightening when you consider the growth in air travel that is now taking place in the developing world. (By 2050 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, estimates that airlines could account for 15% of global Co2 emissions)
In Australia, Canada and the UK all the major household names have an offset policy. Just as well given their taste for nature themed logos. Think kangaroo and maple leaf. “Virgin” too implies responsible behaviour and a certain level of purity. However, in the US, most of the major airlines do not have an offset policy. These include Northwest Airlines, American Airlines, US Airways, Southwest Airlines and United Airlines. Alas the use of geographical terms in their brand names does not appear to translate to an awareness of what is happening to our world.
But is it even enough to offer offsets that merely neutralize C02 emissions? After all there is all that mess left behind from several decades of commercial flying. And do offsets really offset emissions? If it’s a tree planting offset (the case for many of the airlines in this survey) then they might - but it could take 100 years. Not much use if you’re living in the Maldives. Of course offset performance is notoriously difficult to measure, but not a single airline offers an “offset plus” product which would make allowances for unreliable offset measurement.
So what to do? Take a lead from cigarettes, another luxury good that pollutes the air and can have a long term impact on your health. Perhaps labeling aeroplanes with images of pending catastrophe is going too far, and no flying signs would pose practical problems, but taxing luxury goods is standard fare for governments. Can it really be that difficult?
[…] Graffiti correspondent Richard Rhodes recently helped eco-business e-photoframes complete a study on airlines and carbon offset policies. He recently sent an email to a certain large US airline, asking whether it was possible […]
[…] If you’d like to see the full report, as well as the data the report was based on in pretty graph form, it can be viewed here. […]
I can’t say I find the results surprising - the airlines are keeping their heads firmly in the sand on climate change.
But I don’t think offsets are the way to go. They don’t encourage airlines to reduce their own emissions, just pass on an additional cost to consumers. It’s the same with passenger taxes.
I favour an approach (see http://www.reallifenews.com/environment/2007/06/an_alternative_approach_to_air.php) where airports are set limits on the total carbon emissions of the flights to and from the airport. This applies real commercial pressure to reduce flight emissions as airports will favour those airlines with lower carbon so they can maximise the number of flights.
Airlines with higher emissions will find it harder to get landing spots or will be charged higher landing fees - making them non-competitive.
Thanks for your response. Some of my own thoughts:
I think we need to find a way whereby the net emissions impact from airlines is zero. Unless an alternative to jet fuel is discovered we will have to live with some form of offsetting (although I accept the limitations of offsets). Climate change is rapidly reaching tipping point and we need to be a lot more drastic in our response. The airline industry is relatively easy to ring fence and in many ways it plies a luxury good. Governments should look to use airlines as a platform and then extend their reach to other industries. Nothing less than net zero is acceptable.
Only 6% of airlines offer carbon offset
Only 6% of airlines offer carbon offset programs, but are they the way forward? Setting carbon limits on airports should be far more effective at driving down aircraft emissions.
Richard, I think airlines not offering off-sets is actually a good thing. Off-sets allow people to think that they can absolve themselves of the responsibility for their carbon emissions simply by paying someone else to deal with it - they can’t. Off-setting is not the answer, the only way to reduce emissions caused by flying is too fly less or ideally not at all.
Yes, some off-set schemes can make a small difference but it is so difficult to tell if the schemes may have been funded by some other body had the scheme not been in existence etc. At the end of the day we all need to make our own decision how we feel about flying but let’s not let people think they can have their cake and eat it - they can’t.
Have a look at :
http://www.sinkswatch.org/ and
http://wildberrys-blog.blogspot.com/search/label/offsetting
Interesting findings but (in my opinion) carbon off-setting is a complete ‘red herring’. All the planted trees will eventually die of old-age and their CO2 will be returned to the atmosphere by the rotting process. Or they will be burnt for fuel, which again returns the CO2 back into the air. Or the wood will be used for construction, but eventually the houses will reach the end of their life. Of course, I agree that if the ‘CO2 offset forests’ are genuinely new forests, and are kept as forests forever, the CO2 is kept out of the atmospher forever. But it’s difficult to be sure that a forest will be left alone for hundreds or even thousands of years.
Carbon off-setting would only be a true solution if there was some way to put the wood (from the fully grown trees) back under the ground (thousand of feet down, where the oil is now) such that we can be sure that the trapped CO2 will never find its way back into the atmosphere. But this is probably impossible.
Carbon off-setting is a distraction from the only meaningful task of reversing global deforestation (especially of the rainforest).
The only certainty is that at some point in time ALL the oil on the planet will have been burnt (by China & India if not by the rest of us). When all the resultant extra CO2 is in the air, the world needs to have as much permanent forest as possible to reduce the adverse effects of the extra CO2.
Whether the remaining oil (and coal etc..) lasts 50 years or 200 years is the only uncertainty. It is certain that it will all be burnt regardless of whether the average western citizen reduces their ‘CO2 footprint’.
I am just trying to be realistic about what will happen. All we can do is plan for a world where there is a lot of extra CO2 in the air.