Green Gone Wrong by Rogers Heather

Author:Rogers, Heather [Rogers, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub

CHAPTER SIX

The Price of Air:

Carbon Offsets

Gudibanda is a string of dusty villages about sixty kilometers north of Bangalore in the southern state of Karnataka, India. The landscape is rocky and dry, its windswept hills are solid granite, which can rise slowly or jut dramatically into the sky. Men wearing traditional lungis squat on the faces of these massive rocks, tapping chisels along fractures to set loose slabs they can sell to earn a living. People with land grow peanuts, and during the wetter parts of the year, just after the monsoons, rice. Some also raise mango trees and dairy cows. Across fields, herds of goat and sheep amble to and fro and come in like waves at the end of the day following the whistles and shouts of their minders.

Gudibanda would seem an unlikely place for the top British rock band Coldplay. But in 2002, when the group took the ecologically vanguardist step of “neutralizing” the carbon dioxide emissions generated from its second album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, the network of Indian villages that comprise Gudibanda figured prominently. At the time, awareness of, and guilt about, the devastating effects of global warming were beginning to seep into the daily lives of Western consumers. Since CO2 is the biggest contributor to global warming, Coldplay’s actions seemed like a no-brainer. As detailed in a 2006 story by Amrit Dhillon and Toby Harnden that ran in the Sunday Telegraph (London), the band paid a British offset firm called Future Forests, since renamed The CarbonNeutral Company (TCNC), £33,000, just under US$50,000, to plant ten thousand mango trees in fields around Gudibanda. The move was met with a flood of publicity that helped glamorize the act of shrinking one’s carbon footprint. So enthusiastic was Coldplay that they began encouraging their fans to buy trees, too. “You can dedicate more saplings in Coldplay’s forest, a specially-selected section in Karnataka, India,” its website read at the time. For £17.50, about US$25, eager fans could buy a piece of the offset action; in return they received a certificate conferring their participation in establishing “The Coldplay Forest.”

The rock band was ahead of the pack and has since been joined by increasing numbers of fellow musicians, including the Rolling Stones, the Dave Matthews Band, and KT Tunstall. To answer the call, more companies began forming in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and the United States to sell the notional product of carbon offsets. It was becoming easier not just for celebrities but also regular consumers and businesses to pay a little extra to chip in for tree-planting endeavors or renewable energy projects to try to counteract the damage from hopping a plane or hitting the highway.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of offsets. The kind Coldplay purchased is referred to as “voluntary” and is sold by independent firms to organizations, businesses, and individuals who want to reduce the effects of their carbon output. The second type are mandatory offsets, generated as part of the Kyoto Protocol. Under

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