Lunch break & local offsets

Apr 23, 2009 13:01

It's lunch time!

From June 12-14, 2009, the Canadian Environmental Network will convene its annual general assembly in our fair city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and I have been serving on the organizing committee for this event. In the course of this service, I've come to realize that I am quite far behind my national counterparts in terms of political correctness. My attentiveness to affirmative action-type policies is effectively zero, so I'm surprised when people say to me that I don't have enough women, First Nations, youth, Francophones, or visible minorities on the program, and once I'm over that surprise, an new round of work ensues to correct for my oversight.

I doubt I'll ever get over this. It isn't that I don't work with women, First Nations, youth, Francophones, or visible minorities. It's just their status within these categories is such a minor aspect in my consciousness that I'm always overlooking it.

I've been asked via e-mail for my approval of the carbon off-sets service we'll be engaging for the assembly, and I gave my green-light to http://www.econeutral.com/, but added in my response:

What I find awkwardly ironic is that Shell is one of their clients and with my Toxics Watch hat on, I've argued to Shell that these types of programs were not acceptable to us because we wanted Shell to use local offsets.

I've been asked to explain why we favour use of local offsets.

The logic for local offsets arises from the desire to realize local co-benefits from the offset project. Shell argues that we should accept a carbon offset project anywhere in the world for the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from its Scottford Refinery expansion east of Edmonton. Our view is that the East Edmonton airshed is at capacity for emissions other than CO2 as well, and that a well-selected GHG offset project would also reduce emissions of these pollutants. By accepting a GHG offset project outside the Edmonton area, we feel we would be allowing the co-benefit of reduced criteria air contaminant pollution to accrue to another region. Shell gets the credit for a global off-set, but people in East Edmonton still get an increase in air pollution.

In other words, we care about more than just GHGs and argue that national or multi-national organizations should give preference to off-set projects in the region that they are also impacting in other ways.

I do agree with [one of my correspondents] that local off-set are less important with the AGA because the most of the emissions associated with the RCEN AGA arise from travel whose impacts are spread out across the country, so it probably matters less that the off-set project is not in the same region/province as the event itself.

End of lunch break.
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