Save The Planet, Lose The Guilt

The method of transport matters as much as the distance from farm to fork. Sea-freight emissions are less than half those of airfreight, trains are cleaner than trucks, and a tractor-trailer is a green machine compared with an old pickup. If you live east of Columbus, Ohio, it's actually greener to drink French Bordeaux than wine from California, which is trucked over the Rockies, says one study. How food is grown and harvested is also key: New York state apples, for instance, can be less ecofriendly than those imported from New Zealand, where growing conditions produce greater yields with less energy.

The meat equation is also complicated. Some studies show that cattle fed on grass at local organic farms emit 40 percent less methane (a potent greenhouse gas) and consume 85 percent less energy than cows raised on concentrated feed at industrial ranches. When it comes time for slaughter, however, the organic farms must often ship cows to and from centralized slaughterhouses before distributing the meat to retail markets. By the time local beef reaches the plate, it's racked up more miles than industrial beef. Regional food-transport systems are eight to 17 times more efficient than local ones, says the Leopold Center. So local tomatoes may not be as green as they appear.

Lesson: States need to encourage efficiency market by market, rather than assuming local is better.

Carbon Confusion
The fuzziest of all green ideas is carbon offsets. The idea is that you can pay someone to compensate for your own polluting ways. Companies like TerraPass and ClimateSave sell customers certificates for projects that will supposedly shrink their carbon footprint—an individual version of the widely touted carbon market. By some estimates, the personal-offset market was worth $10 million in 2007 and is growing fast. That may not be a good thing.

It's extremely difficult to accurately calculate either the amount of carbon tossed off by the typical household or airline flight, or the amount of carbon absorbed by offset projects like planting trees, funding green research and the like. It's also very hard to figure out where the money spent on offsets really goes. "On a fundamental level, offsets are fraudulent because it's impossible to quantify how much of an offset any project generates," says Kevin Smith, a researcher at Carbon Trade Watch. "You end up having to speculate on a fantasy scenario."

Take the case of airlines, which have recently jumped on the offset bandwagon. Airlines like Delta now offer a flat-rate offset—$5 for domestic flights, $11 for international flights. Others, like Continental, offer options: on a New York-London flight, you can buy an offset for $12.41 (reforestation projects), $32.51 (renewable energy), $36.20 ("gold standard" renewable energy and energy efficiency) or $23.38 (a combination of all three). That three wildly different price points and packages each supposedly produces the same total reduction in carbon emissions speaks to the lack of agreement on what defines an offset. Brian Mullis, president of Sustainable Travel, the company that provides the offsets to Continental, says that while the packages do have the same estimated impact, the higher-priced options have a potential "multiplier effect" because they promote long-term sustainable development. "A metric ton is a metric ton," he says. "But how it's generated has different benefits. We're trying to give customers the option."

The common fallacy for offsets is that they lead directly to activities that compensate for the carbon released by the activity in question. In the case of the plane flight, that is true only for the cheapest option: reforestation, the planting of trees, which absorb carbon. But figuring out how much involves a series of speculative assumptions—about the energy cost of planting the tree, the future growth of the tree and so on. "It's very unproductive to leave people with the impression that we could possibly plant our way out of the problem," says Joe Romm, an expert who has testified before the U.S. Congress on carbon offsets.

The pricier options from firms like Sustainable Travel involve paying other firms to undertake some activity—developing a windmill or solar panel, for instance—that one day may lead to carbon-emissions reductions. The customer buys an offset, and in return gets an abstract and often unprovable promise to reduce emissions. Auden Schendler learned about what he calls this "Wild West" market the hard way. As the in-house "corporate sustainability" advocate for the Aspen Skiing Co., in Colorado, he persuaded his employer to spend $42,000 annually on Renewable Energy Credits, or RECs, but changed his mind last year when closer study revealed that the cheap RECs he had bought probably weren't having much impact. "It wasn't my finest hour," Schendler says. "There are good and bad RECs and the public has no clue. If you're a business, why would you buy the good ones? Why spend $170 when you could spend $2 and get the same PR mileage?" In an unregulated industry, the carbon cowboy is king.

Lesson: Until there is an agreed method for defining and calculating offsets, governments should consider limiting, not promoting, their spread.