Understanding Australian Infrastructure Carbon Reduction Initiative 2 Understanding Australian Infrastructure Carbon Red | Page 5

as additional if the project managers could demonstrate that, for the period in which the carbon savings
of the new lightbulbs were being counted, the recipients wouldn't have acquired low-energy bulbs by
some other means.
The problem is that it's almost impossible to prove additionality with absolute certainly, as no one can be
sure what will happen in the future, or what would have happened if the project had never existed. For
instance, in the case of the lightbulb project, the local government might start distributing low-energy
bulbs to help reduce pressure on the electricity grid. If that happened, the bulbs distributed by the offset
company would cease to be additional, since the energy savings would have happened even if the offset
project had never happened.
Partly because of the difficulty of ensuring additionality, many offset providers guarantee their emissions
savings. This way, if the emissions savings don't come through or they turn out to be "non-additional", the
provider promises to make up the loss via another project.
As the offset market grows, some offset companies have enough capital to invest in projects speculatively:
they fund an offset project and then sell the carbon savings once the cuts have actually been made. This
avoids the difficulty of predicting the future – and also avoids the claim that a carbon cut made some
years in the future is worth less than a cut made now.
These kinds of guarantees and policies provide some reassurances, but do they mean anything in the real
world? Without actually visiting the offset projects ourselves, how can individuals be sure that the projects
are functioning as they should?
To try and answer these questions, the voluntary offset market has developed various standards, which
are a bit like the certification systems used for fairly traded or organic food. These include the Voluntary
Gold Standard (VGS) and the Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS). VGS-certified offsets are audited according
to the rules laid out in the Kyoto protocol and must also show social benefits for local communities. The
VCS, meanwhile, aims to be just as rigorous but without being as expensive or bureaucratic to set up,
thereby allowing a greater range of innovative small-scale projects.
Offsets with these standards offer extra credibility, but that still doesn't make them watertight. Heather
Rogers, author of Green Gone Wrong, visited a number of offset schemes in India and found all kinds of
irregularities. One VGS-certified biomass power plant refused to allow her around, though staff there
reported a number of concerns such as trees being chopped down and sold to the plant, which was
designed to run on agricultural wastes.
Even if offset projects do work as advertised, some environmentalists argue that they're still a bad idea.
If we're to tackle climate change, they argue, the projects being rolled out by offset companies should be
happening anyway, funded by governments around the world, while companies and individuals reduce
their carbon footprints directly. Only in this way – by doing everything possible to make reductions
everywhere, rather than polluting in one place and offsetting in another – does the world have a good
chance of avoiding runaway climate change, such critics claim.
On the other hand, some carbon-neutrality advocates suggest offsetting carbon-intensive activities such
as flights two or three or even ten times over. This, they argue, allows individuals not just to stop their
total carbon footprint from going up, but actually to make it fall.