CRS Fair Trade Goes Carbon-Neutral!
Today is a big day for us: the first day of our carbon-neutral lives! We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with Carbon Fund to offset the carbon emissions generated by mailing out all the Fair Trade educational resources you order through our website.
Every year, thousands of envelopes and boxes filled with Fair Trade catalogs, brochures, posters, flyers, manuals, etc., leave our warehouse in Indiana on trucks and head out in every direction, to be delivered free-of-charge to Fair Trade consumers and advocates like you. We are thrilled that there is so much interest in Fair Trade and so many people are asking for our materials, and we are committed to continue providing this service as part of our educational mission. But we do feel a twinge of regret about all that mail, since every time a delivery truck pulls out, we are emitting global-warming carbon into the atmosphere. It seemed to us a shame to be doing environmental harm in promoting such a powerful message of economic justice and social change, so we decided to do something about it.
From now on, every package you receive from the CRS Fair Trade Program should have this sticker on it:
It means that our Fair Trade Program has invested in enough of Carbon Fund’s renewable energy, energy efficiency or reforestation projects to offset the amount of carbon that your shipment releases into the atmosphere. So order guilt-free and spread the important messages of Fair Trade and carbon-neutrality!
Want to do more to lighten your ecological footprint? Calculate your own carbon footprint and offset your emissions at carbonfund.org.
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I write about this a lot on my site that covers global warming and I am typically very skeptical of carbon trading schemes.
P.T. Barnum supposedly said that there was a sucker born every minute. Sometimes, when I read about carbon credits, I am not sure who the sucker is – the person buying, the person selling, or the general public for thinking it is helping!
In order for credits to be feasible and to be more than a “feel good” gesture, we need solid accounting, accountability, and penalties. We have none of that now and this article makes this painfully clear. We cannot allow credits to be used for minor contributions to a project. The credit must go to the cost of reducing the greenhouse gas.
Sean:
Thanks for your comment. I will try not to take the PT Barnum reference personally!
: )
I really appreciate your critical analysis of global warming issues, and your skepticism about carbon trading schemes. I actually just had an exchange yesterday with a very experienced and highly respected leader in the Fair Trade community, who also expressed some concern about our move to carbon-neutrality. That person’s take on this issue–similar in some respects to yours–is that people will see carbon offsets as an easy way to feel good about their consumption habits and to avoid making the more fundamental changes in their underlying behaviors that may be ecologically irresponsible or unsustainable. Without question, we share that concern.
But we don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. We are committed to Fair Trade education in the United States, and to shipping Fair Trade resources to people who want to learn more about conscious consumerism. Since our education mission leads us to ship materials by ground no matter what, our position is that it is better to offset the carbon generated by that activity than not to.
Meantime, we make available for download all the print and AV resources that people order from our website in an effort to reduce the total amount of shipping we do. Our hope is that more and more people will access the electronic versions from their desktops and fewer and fewer from their mailboxes.
And of course, our Fair Trade Program is just one small part of everything we do as at CRS. The agency’s commitment to environmental sustainability plays out in lots of other important ways here in the United States, where we just built a LEED-certified headquarters building, and overseas, where we work in dozens of countries around the world to promote sustainable agriculture and sustainable economic development.
In sum, we hear you. We don’t want–nor do we expect–carbon-neutrality to be the end of our efforts to lighten our footprint, but just the beginning.
Michael
Hi Sean,
I appreciate your critique, and believe every criticism of carbon offsets deserves a clear and measured response.
The first step is to frame the offset argument: First, there is the technical argument. This usually consists of whether or not offsets are “real,” or really make a difference. The second argument is purely philosophical – whether offsets promote a checkbook environmentalism mentality. This is where the “indulgence” rhetoric comes into play.
Before I address these two issues, I want to briefly demystify carbon offsets in general. CO2 is the major greenhouse gas causing climate change and when we burn fossil fuels, we produce it. An offset is nothing more than a reduction in CO2. And anything that reduces CO2 has the potential to be an offset – you don’t even need to use Carbonfund.org. All we do is apply an economy of scale to make it easier and more affordable.
Imagine you have a tool shed which uses nothing but one 60 watt light bulb. Over 8,000 hours of use, this light bulb will use enough electricity to produce 643 pounds of CO2 (based on a national average). If you replace that light bulb with an equivalent compact fluorescent bulb, your CO2 footprint suddenly shrinks to only 139 pounds. Now, say that 139 pounds is still nagging at you. Short of putting a solar panel on the roof of your tool shed, you don’t have many other options. So, you purchase a CFL for your neighbor’s tool shed and present it as a gift and he installs it. Now you’re responsible for reducing 1,080 pounds of CO2 when your original footprint was 643 pounds. You tool shed is now technically 437 pounds carbon negative. Congratulations.
Carbonfund.org does exactly this, but on a massive scale. Thus far we’ve reduced nearly 1.9 billion pounds of CO2 by supporting large scale projects. Another great example is planting trees. You could take a weekend and plant a tree in your yard for say, 150 bucks. Or you could contribute to Carbonfund.org and plant a tree in Nicaragua for $3.50. By the end of the September, we’ll have planted more than 200,000 trees – paid for by people doing exactly this.
So now I’ll address the technical issues. On this, I couldn’t agree with you more. Projects need to be additional, verifiable, real, audited, and a million other things. Our Nicaragua project was in development for 6 months before we even began its execution. And it will continue to be measured and monitored for a very long time. I’ll readily admit there are organizations out there selling offsets that are none of these things, but they are few and far between. As the rules get better and time goes on, the projects also get better and we start making a real progress. The second half of this argument is that the offset industry isn’t government regulated. I think you’d be hard pressed to find any large offset organization that isn’t screaming for regulation – both for the voluntary carbon offset market as well as a nationwide cap and trade. But I will point out that it’s hardly the “wild west” out there in the voluntary market. There are numerous well-respected third parties out there certifying the legitimacy of offsets, just like there is a third party organization out there certifying fair trade.
In short, although there is room for improvement, there are some extremely well developed systems out there to ensure that your money results directly in CO2 reductions.
Even Mother Teresa had a carbon footprint:
The philosophical issues surrounding offsets are where things get tricky. The argument goes that rich people continue polluting just as they always have and simply pay an offset to relieve their guilt. Our motto here at Carbonfund.org is, “Reduce what you can, offset what you can’t.” We ask that every individual and business do everything possible to reduce CO2 emissions directly through behavioral changes and then offset the rest. If you take a trip to Grandma’s house you really only have two choices – you can offset the resulting emissions, or not. Whether every one of our donors is falling over themselves to reduce their emissions before offsetting is an open question, and for this I’d ask you to take a look at a survey done by a for-profit offset “competitor” of ours (I hate using competitor to describe other organizations trying to do some good). I’ll let you see the results for yourself: http://www.terrapass.com/images/blogposts/tp-survey.pdf I would venture to say that somewhere out there in the world there is a hummer owner that buys offsets, but at least they’re thinking about it.
I have a hard time with the indulgence issue because it seems so absurd, yet such a popular criticism. I support fair trade because I know it’s the right thing to do. And in supporting fair trade, I support the CO2-producing marketing that goes along with it. At the same time, climate change is going to affect farmers in developing countries more than any other group of people in the world. I’m speaking at a workshop on climate change in Nicaragua in two weeks. When I asked how well the people I would be speaking to (rural farmers) understood climate change, the response I got is that they understand it very well because they’re already seeing the changes. Without offsets, there really isn’t a way to reconcile all of this. I think we all want to do the right thing here, and at times, such as this one in particular, those right things contradict one another. I fully respect what Catholic Relief Services is doing here because they have made what they deem to be the most responsible decision, and I agree with this decision wholeheartedly.
If you want to follow up me personally, you can reach me at scarney@carbonfund.org
Sean Carney
Climate Change Specialist
Carbonfund.org
In case you hadn’t heard, another well-known Catholic institution also went carbon-neutral recently: the Vatican. Great piece in today’s Times that discusses some of the theology behind the Vatican’s decision to become the world’s first carbon-neutral state: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/world/europe/17carbon.html?_r=1&oref=slogin