Could George Monbiot have inadvertently saved offsetting?
© John Russell, used under Creative Commons 2.0
Twenty years ago, I was on the board of Carbon Neutral North East (CNNE), a local charity that took carbon offsets from individuals and organisations and invested them in local tree-planting and loft insulation schemes. However, the writer and activist George Monbiot threw a stick in the spokes with a Guardian article likening offsetting to people in medieval Europe buying indulgences from the church after committing serious crimes to save themselves from the gallows.
The article kicked off a debate on the whys and wherefores of offsetting schemes and led to the emergence of a new standard which precluded our carbon reduction schemes being in the UK. The argument was the UK was a Kyoto signatory country and thus “should be reducing carbon emissions anyway.” Without the local angle, we decided to wind up CNNE – we had no way of checking the integrity of schemes overseas.
Did a single person stop flying, sell their car or replace their gas boiler because they couldn’t buy offsets from us? Almost certainly not. And we could have spent the last couple of decades planting trees and insulating the homes of the fuel poor. But, hey, let’s sit on the moral high ground and watch emissions continue to rise. Bitter? Me?
Anyhoo, I smiled to myself at the recent announcement that Monbiot had been instrumental to the development of a new approach of using seismology to measure soil health. Why? Because one of the most difficult things in selling robust carbon credits is providing assurance that carbon is actually being stored in soil in regenerative agriculture projects, or that carbon sequestration through tree-planting is not counter-balanced by carbon loss from disturbing the soil.
In both these cases, traditional methods involve taking lots of soil samples and extrapolating between them. Given how widely the properties of soil can vary across a single field, this becomes a trade off between cost and accuracy, and is vulnerable to manipulation. Monbiot’s non-invasive seismic technology (in both senses of the word) could bring an order of magnitude more robustness to measuring soil carbon, and thus to the quality of any carbon credits sold.
Now that would be ironic!