The great global warming swindle

The West is running a protectionist racket against the developing world

Ross Clark

08 August 2007

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The West’s new greenness conceals a giant protectionist racket

What the concept of food miles does achieve, on the other hand, is very neatly to discriminate against farmers in the far-off Third World and in favour of local farmers. It is a straightforward protectionist device. That so few ‘enlightened’ Western consumers seem able to see this is worrying, but not as depressing as the failure of consumers to see through the carbon-offsetting business. ‘Neutralising’ one’s carbon emissions has expanded from Hollywood stars planting a few trees on their estates to a multimillion pound business much patronised by politicians out to earn brownie points. If you are flying off to the sun this week, the chances are you will have been invited to counter the pollution caused by your plane by paying a few pounds to help reduce carbon emissions somewhere else in the world.

At least the naivety of the Hollywood stars who thought they could neutralise the emissions of fossil fuels by planting trees (which store carbon only for the 100 years or so in which they are alive) was less damaging than some of the carbon-offset schemes on offer now. Delegates to the 2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles, for example, were given a certificate to say that the emissions from their flights had been offset by a scheme to replace the tin roofs of huts in a shantytown suburb of Cape Town with a more insulating material. In other words, you burn airline fuel, while a South African peasant saves heating oil.

What could possibly be wrong with that? Quite a lot, actually. It stands to reason that the carbon emitted by delegates’ flights will only continue to be offset for as long as the occupants of the huts carry on living in shanty-town conditions. If, in a couple of years’ time, they better themselves to the point that they can afford a home just a little closer to the standard enjoyed by the average resident of the first world (never mind one like Al Gore’s Tennessee mansion, recently found to consume 20 times as much energy as the average US home), they will replace their insulated shacks with much more power-hungry bungalows. It is the same with carbon-offset schemes to provide Kenyans with dung-powered generators, replacing Indians’ kerosene lamps with solar-powered lamps or all the rest. As acts of charity they are one thing, but as carbon-offset schemes they