Carbon vignette
Home » Magazine » Good, issue 2 » Good start » Carbon vignetteEmily Perkins tries to offset her carbon guilt with a peak oil lecture and local wine in Wales
Eco-worrier
Let’s get the awkward part over first: the air miles. This month I’ve flown Auckland–Toronto–Chicago–London, and taken the Eurostar to Paris. I think trains are eco-friendly, but the Victorians invented them and we know what they did for air quality. Of course, people have been offsetting carbon miles for years, but I’ve never really understood how this works and now suspect that, as it allows you to zip around the globe with an assuaged conscience, the scheme is fundamentally flawed: doubts that a little bit of Googling confirm. Mass tree-planting is so over, unless you want to contribute to capitalist projects of land dispossession and hear those Victorians chortling from beneath their marble headstones.
Investing in bio-energy is potentially dodgy, especially if you’re concerned about genetic engineering—biofuels have dangerous implications for food security. I don’t actually know what many of the words in that last sentence mean but they sound quite serious.
Thing is, getting information from the internet is like soliciting your friends for advice until one of them tells you exactly what you want to hear. “Should I buy these shoes?” “You deserve them.” It all depends on when you stop Googling. The web tells me that carbon offsetting is not great for the planet and I should just pray for an upgrade, knock back a Bloody Mary and forget about it. But maybe this isn’t really true—only what my lazy petrol-burning subconscious wants to believe.
I’m totally confused, and it isn’t just because I think bio-fuel is a breakfast cereal. Who to trust? Settling for offsetting, without making other changes, seems like relying on The Scientists to come up with a Concorde that runs on air. (There is a paraplegic woman currently circumnavigating Britain using the power of her breath, but it’s fair to say she is an over-achiever.) And simply replacing our gas-guzzling cars with electric models is the equivalent of vegetarians eating fake-meat cutlets—in other words, missing the point.
The environmentally friendly silver lining in my evil air travel is the opportunity to hear eco-warrior journalist George Monbiot in person, at the Hay Festival, near the Welsh borders. He lives nearby, and doesn’t take planes. The session is on peak oil, a concept which terrifies me because I have no skills for a post-oil future and will be scrabbling on the gates of the survivors’ compound, cast out in the darkness with the supermodels and rally drivers. If I brave a talk on peak oil, my logic runs, maybe I can relax my rules on local produce and won’t have to drink Welsh wine. (Coming to accept that you have to change your life in order to stop global warming is a bit like going through Kubler-Ross’s seven stages of grief. I am stuck on Bargaining.)
This dodgy reasoning aside, the session, which touches on clean coal, urban planning, the importance of political theatre and the inherent corruption in US electoral campaign financing, is inspiring. The point is made several times that nobody knows when global oil stocks will run dry. The price of oil may be pushed because there are dwindling supplies or because the cartels are getting us used to paying more. It could be that OPEC is exaggerating the reserves or, as some say, that oil supplies are good for another 40 years. If they are, so what? Will we have mastered the compressed-air engine by then? (I think not, because family members of mine have invested in its development at a plant in India, and family members of mine don’t have that kind of luck.) And the idea that using our cars as much as ever, only hoping they will soon run on bananas, is our old friend the tofu sausage all over again.
It might be that Monbiot’s arguments run close to my own thoughts on the distribution of wealth, and that he’s not opposed to on-shore wind farms (yes!), but it isn’t just the Welsh chardonnay that leaves me feeling hopeful and roused to action. Our climate crisis demands a holistic approach to change. We need better-designed communities and global fair trade policies that truly are fair. Governments can and must find other indices for measuring human welfare than economic growth. I can’t quite fly home on these wings of inspiration but I feel ready to deal with those carbon credits and open my mind to new, better ways of living. Just have to figure out how. Another Bloody Mary, please.
Tue September 20, 2011 @ 08:04 AM
