Is carbon offsetting worthwhile? First up, watch An Inconvenient Truth....
Climate Change is happening due to human actions - and that includes Skeleton!! The debate on the value of Carbon Offsetting is whether you actually contribute to something that wouldn't happen without your help, and whether your contribution actually 'cancels out' the pollution your actions created. I've decided that making a financial contribution to a 'genuine' CO2 offsetting programme will have more environmental benefit than if I did nothing - although admittedly not as much as not flying at all! The competition season has us travelling a lot (9 seperate locations around the world in 2006/7). Using www.climatecare.org my flights were calculated to have emitted 5.97 tonnes of CO2 - equivalent to the annual emissions of an average UK house (although at altitude this has a worse effect on global warming!) In the UK I use the train and cycle a lot, my business is also orientated around improving the energy efficiency of the UK housing stock - it is an issue I'm very aware of. I believe success in Skeleton will give me a platform from which to have a positive influence on these issues, until then I'll continue to look for more inovative ways to reduce my own personal carbon footprint.
3 comments:
Ant, I have 2 Words to add to the interminable Global Warming debate: Milankovitch Cycles. It's inevitable. I don't think we help ourselves on a local scale, but seriously, this planet is destined to do the whole interglacial/glacial thing all over again and there is nothing we can do about it. Although I'd love to be a fly on the wall when the temperature starts dropping and governments start panicking about 'Global Cooling' and everyone moves to Africa! lol.
From Wikipedia: "Two caveats are necessary: that anthropogenic effects (global warming) are likely to exert a larger influence over the short term, and that the mechanism by which orbital forcing influences climate is not well understood."
There are cycles - natural ones - if you look around, human activities are unbalancing those rythems. Ecologically, economically and socially the world could be a more beautiful place - it is not someone elses responsibility to create that!
I really think you misunderstand my comment:
It's certainly true that on a local scale, industrial and anthropogenic factors affect our immediate environment - this cannot be any better illustrated than pollution levels in large cities, however my point is that when discussing global warming, there is a tendancy to flagellate ourselves and imply that the ENTIRE gamut of global warming 'symptoms' are as a result of US directly. It must ALSO be considered that over the long term geological timescales, global rise in temperature is a NATURAL phenomenon that is controlled by factors WAY beyond our influence or control, and that the Earth is on a constant cycle of glacial/interglacial periods. Without these CRUCIAL periods of sea level rise and fall, and temperature extremes, we would be sorely lacking in such resources as Salt, for example, formed in ocean basins when the rise in Sea level fills a basin with saline water, then the sea level drops again leaving that sea 'stranded', then a rise in temperature dries out said sea, leaving salt and halite beds hundreds of metres thick. Which we then mine...
My point is NOT that our attempts to control our local carbon footprint are futile, because they're not - in the immediate environment, the more ecologically friendly we are, the better our living environment will be, certainly, and it is certainly worth being conscious of our own contribution (although re: Recycling - It frustrates me that we have a recycle bin, yet there is so much plastic and metal we're not allowed to put in it!!!). HOWEVER, we can never, and will never prevent the earth from heading back into it's interglacial high, we can't stop the melting of the ice caps or the rise and fall of the sea level any more than we can stop the earth rotating. Stopping it completely is an unobtainable goal, and I think a lot of people lose sight of this when the global warming debate gets going. Because it is the perfect way to 'prove' that big industries and car owners are the Big Bad Wolf. The GW debate is so frequently used as a tool with which to flog people, that it frustrates me when people are so extremist in their views and refuse to accept EONS of Geological evidence and factor that into their arguements.
THIS is my point. The GW debate frustrates me ENDLESSLY, because we ALL have a responsibility to ourselves and each other to maintain our living environment (however human nature being as it is, there will always be a percentage of individuals that do their utmost to wreck it out of sheer bloody-mindedness), however to say 'We pump too much CO2 into the Atmosphere, we're melting the ice caps and killing polar bears', is a gross generalisation (and I have seen this in sensationalist literature and this is the generalised message that seems to be prevailent among the less well-educated). Polar Bears and polar species generally suffer for their specialisms, this is how evolution has worked over each of the preceding cycles, with each successive cycle refining the remaining life forms and ecological balance of the earth. If this wasn't the case, I doubt we would exist. As it is, we have endured because of our adaptation and ability to adjust to our environment (having said that, I do think we haven't helped ourselves very much... But thats another debate entirely).
So I'm sorry if you thought my previous comment was a challenge, because it wasn't intended that way at all. And to echo my earlier comment: I'd love to witness a debate on 'Global Cooling', providing the human race hasn't annihilated itself by the time the Interglacial is ready to swing back towards the Glacial...
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