A Critical Conversation on Climate Change ... - Green Choices

lessons unlearned 191face to the public, keep gas as an option, and make marginal efficiencyimprovements. Responding to carbon prices is one thing; taking practicallong-term action on climate change quite another.The truth is that carbon prices are a pretty inferior way of educatingcorporations about climate change and its importance for theirwork. Insurance companies are already learning fast through othermeans – including Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans– that global warming threatens their business. Power utilities, technologydevelopers and retailers are already asking governments forlonger-term signals than those that are provided by a market. Thereare more credible ways of entering into a dialogue about climate withcorporations than by appealing to a new commodity system whosefl imsy basis they are only too well aware of. As University of Londongeographer John Adams notes in a similar context, ‘[T]reasuries andbig business are better equipped than most to notice when someone isspeaking nonsense in their own language.’ 447Maybe so, but how about the case of individual consumers?You mean people buying carbon credits in the ‘voluntary market’ tomake up for the carbon dioxide emitted during their jet fl ights or internationalconferences?Yes. Admittedly, these carbon credits – the ones you buy from fi rms like theCarbon Neutral Company, Climate Care, Atmosfair, Natsource, Terrapass,DrivingGreen, Drive Neutral, carbonfund.org, MyClimate, AtmosClear ClimateClub, Carbonfund.org or Climate Friendly – don’t really make your jetfl ight or home or daily driving verifi ably ‘carbon-neutral’ or ‘zero carbon’. Butwhen you buy these ‘off sets,’ at least you have to calculate how much carbonyou emit in your daily life. That can’t help but improve your awareness of thecauses of climate change.Take a simple example. An executive trainer from Reading, UK named CharlotteRobson recently learned for the fi rst time from the Carbon Neutral Company’scarbon calculator that her personal carbon ‘footprint’ was 24 tonnes ofcarbon dioxide per year. ‘I am astonished I have been such a monster,’ Robsonwrote in the London Daily Telegraph. 448 Isn’t it great that people like her arediscovering the real impacts of their actions?It’s not clear what is really being discovered here. Is the cause of climatechange really that individuals like Charlotte Robson are ‘monsters’? IsCharlotte Robson personally responsible for the historical lock-in ofheavy fossil fuel use in industrialised societies? Does she choose for theUK government to use her tax money to subsidise oil extraction androad and airport construction rather than renewable energy? Did she