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

offsets – the fossil economy’s new arena of conflict 273the firm put usd 500,000 into a revolving fund to buy photovoltaic(solar-home) systems and install them in ‘remote households withoutelectricity in India, China and Sri Lanka’. 103 In 1999, PacificCorpPower and the City of Klamath Falls signed the necessary financeagreement with a US solar-energy company called the Solar ElectricLight Company, or SELCO. 104In all, SELCO agreed to install 182,000 solar-home systems in thesethree Asian countries, 120,000 in Sri Lanka alone. 105 The idea was thatthe solar systems would reduce the carbon dioxide emissions givenoff by the kerosene lamps commonly used in households that are ‘offgrid’,or without grid-connected electricity. On average, SELCO calculated,each such household generates 0.3 tons of carbon dioxide peryear. 106 SELCO argued that the installation of a 20- or 35-watt solarhomesystem would displace three smoky kerosene lamps and a 50-watt system would displace four. Over the next 30 years, it claimed,these systems would prevent the release of 1.34 million tons of carboninto the atmosphere, entitling the Klamath Falls power plant to emitthe same amount.So what’s the problem? It sounds like a win-win situation. The Klamath Fallsplant makes itself ‘carbon-neutral’, while deprived Asian households get a new,clean, green, small-scale source of energy for lighting!Not quite. Aside from the fact that such projects can’t, in fact, verifythat they make fossil fuel burning ‘carbon-neutral’ (see Chapter 3),the benefits to the South that carbon offsetting promises don’t necessarilymaterialise, either.Why not?Start with the structure of the trade. Just as industries in the North havehistorically relied on the environmental subsidy that cheap mineralextraction in the South has provided, in the PacificCorp/SELCOproject a Northern industry used decentralised solar technologyto reorganise off-grid spaces in the South into spaces of economicopportunity that subsidised their costs of production through carbondioxide offsetting. 107 Once again, the South was subsidising productionin the North – this time not through a process of extraction, butthrough a process of sequestration.You’ll have to explain that to me.Traditionally, fossil fuel extraction has resulted in the overuse of agood that can’t be seen – the global carbon sink. And the inequalityin the use of that sink between North and South has been invisible.Now, however, that inequality is becoming more visible within cer-