Carbon Credits

I strongly recommend Alan Atkisson's piece on carbon credits. Atkisson explores the difficulties of the carbon credit issue, from the inability of a worker for a NGO to not use massive amounts of carbon flying to conferences to the many flaws of carbon neutralization plans.

I'm particularly interested in his exploration of the ethical dilemmas of the modern environmental movement:

"...if you "pay" an African village not to use fossil fuel, and then put the benefits of that transaction into your own "carbon account," isn't that a new form of colonialism? Haven't you purchased one of that village's most valuable assets -- their rights to a fair share of global carbon emissions -- at an inappropriately low price, and removed it from their use forever? How is that different, ethically speaking, from buying historical artifacts that belong in a local museum?"

That's a great question. I think answer is yes. So long as westerners claim the right to use resources (or buy and sell an abstracted form as is the case here) without giving the developing world the right to do so as well, it is a form of neo-colonialism.

Of course this doesn't mean that we need to give up on trying to bring the world's peoples into a global system of environmental protection and fuel rationing. But it does mean that we should be very careful about what those interactions mean and be aware of the consequences of our actions as individuals on the developing world.