In what is being hailed a landmark deal for California – California Attorney General Jerry Brown announced ConocoPhillips has agreed to pay $10 million to offset emissions from its proposed expansion of an oil refinery near San Francisco.
The money is supposed to offset 500,000 tons of C02 that the expansion would release every year, once operating in 2009. The money will be used on various offset projects, including:
- $7 million to start a fund that will finance projects to cut carbon dioxide in the Bay Area operated under guidelines to be developed by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District
- $2.8 million to grow trees in mature forests that absorb carbon dioxide.
- $200,000 would help restore wetlands on San Pablo Bay.
- 70,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions would be cut from a ConocoPhillips facility in Santa Barbara County.
You can read the CNN story, the SF Chronicle story, or my critical take on it below.
So, I’m generally not a fan of offsets. I’ve written about it before, our friends at Grist have had a raging debate on it, and I’ll spare you by not totally rehashing the argument. While I’m not saying ALL offsets are all bad – a huge chunk of “action” being taken on climate change these days is via offsets, either at the personal level, the corporate level, or the international Kyoto/Clean Development Mechanism level. Offsets allow one source (person, power plant, company, country etc) to keep on polluting, while theoretically reducing emissions from another source somewhere else that would (sic) have theoretically happened if it weren’t for our intervention. But if we are to seriously tackle climate change, we can’t offset forever – we have to make tangible reductions in emissions from all sources. Given that we have a decade at best to make some serious headway on reducing our emissions – we need to get a lot more serious about restructuring our energy systems, not just offsetting. So here are my thoughts on this deal:
THE GOOD:
- While California’s new law AB32 (which calls for the state to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 25% in order to reach 1990 levels by 2020) doesn’t take affect until 2012, this is a decent interim step to at least get some sort of positive steps from Conoco.
- The $7 million spent to create a fund for carbon reductions is a good start. Hopefully this fund will be well-managed – but this is what we need. Start taxing companies that are big polluters to create pools of money that can get conservation, efficiency, and renewable projects off the ground. We need to level the playing field – and stop subsidizing dirty energy. Remember California’s Prop 87? This type of seed money is crucial.
THE BAD:
- Conoco is still expanding our addiction to fossil fuels. This plant locks us in to dirty energy for decades to come. While offsets may theoretically balance out emissions from this specific plant- any new fossil-fuel infrastructure commits us to a path of dirty energy. This expansion further invests Conoco to fossil fuels, and they can’t (well, won’t) switch gears anytime soon and suddenly start supporting renewables. For every major investment in fossil fuels – we are not just losing that direct money to dirty energy (rather than solutions), we are creating that much more economic, political, and industry determination to continue using that technology for years to come.
- While C02 emissions may be offset, this doesn’t address concerns for other pollutants, like mercury and selenium. Communities located nearby the plant, which have been ravaged by environmental justice issues for decades, are still suffering. Communities for a Better Environment has been organizing against Conoco and Chevron’s dirty refineries there for years, and this compromise by the state will only make their struggle more difficult.
- Chevron (just down the road from ConocoPhillips) is also trying to expand their operations. And they’ll likely get a very similar deal to Conoco. Again, further increasing our reliance on fossil fuels for decades to come, investing billions of dollars in the wrong direction.
- Plating trees just shouldn’t fly as an acceptable means of offseting emissions. Check out this post at Grist for a good explanation. Luckily the tree-planting portion of the deal is not the bulk of it, but it shouldn’t be any part of it. Trees serve a valuable role beyond carbon storage – and we need to be protecting the biodiversity of existing old-growth forests, not planting little tree farms while the same economic system chops down actual forests.
The offsets are better than nothing, but should not be viewed as a solution to climate change. It’s time to stand up to fossil fuel and simply say no. While I don’t want Chevron controlling renewable energy either – that should be the only way they get to expand ANYTHING in their business – if it gets us off fossil fuels.
-Matt
Twitter Updates
For some perspective, consider that CP made $301 million profit last quarter. That’s roughly 140K per hour, so it took about two and a half days for CP to make $10 million.
Modest really. It only took Chevron about four hours to make 10 million last quarter. Exxon did it in about two hours.
I think Jerry Brown had it right when he called this beginning to get on the path towards a solution.
If California is serious about tackling climate change, then what we need is for everyone to get on the superhighway or the high speed train, ASAP – and that means reducing pollution is the top priority, and offsetting should be a distant second. (and offsetting should be meeting some serious, meaningful standards as well, not the wild west economy that it currently is.)