****December 2010 Focus - Focus Magazine

Coaching for
Deep Transformation
with Donna Morton, Robin June Hood
Nikki Sanchez & John T. Shields
Make shifts in your personal & professional life
to “be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Donna Morton
Coach and Social Entrepreneur
• Transformational coaching for individuals,
families and organizations.
• Visioning, branding and storytelling
• Aligning personal and group power into action
dmorton@firstpowercanada.ca
250-880-1430
..... natural relations
Iam a carbon cowgirl. For the last three years,
I’ve been riding the range on my pony Green
Gold, trying to find out if carbon offsets can
help us buy both time and threatened natural
ecosystems (which function as carbon sinks) in
the climate-change countdown.
If ever there was a wild-west frontier, the
carbon markets are it, with cowboys from
Texas to Hamburg lassoing carbon deals.
I have been venturing into the lesser known
territory of conservation offsets for two good
reasons: First, there is no human invention on
Earth that can surpass stomata for sucking
carbon out of the air and storing it in wood,
leaves and soil. And secondly, our biggest source
of carbon emissions in BC—more than transportation
and energy sectors together—is
industrial land uses and destruction of our
forest sinks. You don’t hear about this statistic
because there is a loophole in the Kyoto protocol
that doesn’t require us to include forest emissions
in our carbon accounting.
So I’ve ridden my horse down Howe Street
again, but this time I’ve tethered her at the
base of those skyscrapers and taken my chances
in the boardrooms. I have gone into the belly
of the beast, and am reporting back to readers
who might be confused about offsets, and view
them understandably with the same suspicion
as another sub-prime bubble.
The BC government’s recent release of a
draft Forest Carbon Offset Protocol, along
with their participation in BC’s first public/private
forest carbon offset project on Denman Island,
have precipitated a lot of questions, and it is
time this carbon cowgirl waded into the discussion.
(To those of you who run for cover on
this topic, a quick summation: If offsets do
what they are supposed to do, then they can
be useful. The Denman project, however, is
not a good prototype.)
First some background. Offsets were designed
as a breaking-in-of-the-bronco to help fund
the transition out of a business-as-usual scenario.
The general belief is that a carbon tax is the
best way to go and offsets are a stopgap measure.
Offsets start with the voluntary sector where
any dudes can get into the saddle, then progress
to legally enforced ones, as in a cap-and-trade
system (coming to BC in 2012). Having spent
the previous two years on the wild political
▲ ▲
The calculations of a carbon cowgirl
BRIONY PENN
Offsets could be used to save nature—but a lot can go wrong.
PHOTO: DAVID BROADLAND
Carbon storage facility.
front running on a federal carbon tax platform,
I had to ask myself the question: Do we
have the time to wait around for political
change I got into the carbon saddle to learn
the ropes and see if small pilots could enable
large democratic institutions to follow.
To make offsets do what they are supposed
to do, principles must be applied through the
international protocols to ensure projects have
genuine atmospheric benefit. To that end, it
is critical to ask of every offset project: Does
the project lead to a different scenario than
business-as-usual Second, does the project
avoid shifting the problem elsewhere Third,
are credits awarded in the year that the emissions
are avoided or captured And finally, are
these emissions avoided permanently with
insurance and legally binding documents
Most readers will not even be aware that
forest offsets are an option. We have become
so accustomed to offsets that are “grey” like
bioenergy and waste projects—not “green”
with stomata—that you could be forgiven for
not knowing that saving the Earth was the
original motivation. Why Energy alternatives
involve gadgets, production and markets;
saving forests don’t. The lobby for forest offsets
is just a handful of us carbon cowgirls and boys
that don’t stand to make any money on a new
patent. The international community acknowl-
42 December 2010 • FOCUS