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The UK budget promoted carbon offsets, but the Treasury says it has nothing to do with them
Robbie Watt • Apr 01, 2021
Why was a carbon offsetting working group announced in the Budget?
I was surprised when I heard the UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak announce in the March 2021 budget that Clara Furse would be establishing a working group that would position the City of London as a major hub for the trade of voluntary carbon credits. I wanted to know more about the government's plans, so I sent the Treasury a Freedom of Information request (with some assistance from Dr Marc Hudson).
The Treasury's response
to me said that the carbon offset working group was a private sector initiative that would receive no support from the government. Except, I suppose, being announced in the Budget. I wonder what the procedures are now if one wants to set up a private initiative and get it publicised by a cabinet minister in parliament.
Climate Emergency Manchester
sets up working groups to encourage citizens to pressure for effective climate action in the city. Perhaps we'll write to Rishi Sunak next year and ask for a budget shout-out. Or are the rules different for us?
A classroom activity that helps us reflect on some fundamentals of human behaviour, global politics, and the climate crisis
The provocative set-up of Calder Szewczak's The Offset is a world where 18-year-olds must barbarically choose a parent to kill in a public execution. The logic of this ‘offset’ by capital punishment is to promote de-population, since resources are scarce. And it gives children, who are assumed to resent being born, the chance to avenge their birthing. The brutal forced choice allows the novel to explore the relations of two female parents and their rebellious but needy child. The characters’ dilemmas and inner conflicts of navigating through dire situations feel chillingly conceivable (no pun intended). The dystopia is strangely credible as it connects with some realities of the present world. The critique of anti-natalism is evident in the novel – the cruelty and ramifications of public parental executions are displayed in their horror – and yet its authors are openly sympathetic towards anti-natalist viewpoints . This probably helped them in presenting to readers the logics that might drive society towards such a ruthless arrangement. Moreover, the meaning of ‘the offset’ is doubled in the book, as it equally connects to efforts to ‘offset’ greenhouse gas emissions that exist in the present day. One of the parents who might be executed is a prominent scientist attempting to grow genetically modified trees in the radioactive wasteland of Greenland. The (deluded) hope in the potential of carbon dioxide removal and academic genius in a future Earth with a seriously depleted environment brings the novel into disturbing conversations with the present.
Derik Broekhoff and Mark Trexler commented on voluntary carbon markets for a Climate Now podcast , where they were interviewed by Katherine Gorman and James Lawler. I don’t agree with the way everything is framed here, but Trexler and Broekhoff, two individuals with a lot of experience in these markets, do raise some important points. I highlight some comments that I broadly agree with and consider important. On Net Zero and carbon offsets “The net zero that you're sort of accomplishing through the individual efforts [through offset claims, etc] … is entirely different from the net zero that we're talking about at a societal level.” (Trexler) “The vast majority of … businesses around the world shouldn't be focusing on net zero, they should be focusing on getting to zero emissions.” (Broekhoff) “There's a big question as to, ‘is this the time to start doing a lot more voluntary stuff, as opposed to figuring out how we rapidly transition to net zero at a societal level?’” (Trexler) Additionality, quality & race to the bottom “We never can know with absolute certainty whether something is additional or not. So, the idea that we have the standards that decide this is additional or not, is sort of misleading from the get-go. In reality, there's a continuum.” (Trexler) “One thing that happens a lot, you start with something additional, but then people bring try and say, ‘Oh, well, I can make some money if I can get all these [non-additional] good deed projects into the market’ [using the newly approved methodology]” (Trexler) “The quality of offsets is on a continuum, from low quality to high quality. And yet, once you're certified as an offset, once you've gotten your project validated, you can claim to be as good as anyone else. And that's a real problem, because then everybody goes for the cheapest stuff. And you end up in a race to the bottom of quality.” (Trexler) Integration with the Paris Agreement A long but effective summary from Broekhoff: “Now, we're in a situation where if you go and invest in mitigation somewhere, whether that's emission reductions, or removing co2 from the atmosphere, there's a good chance that it's covered by one of these national pledges that a national government somewhere has already pledged to make that reduction or make that removal. And so, if you're going to try to claim that as an offset as a company, right, you're basically saying, well, ‘but for my purchase of this carbon credit, that emission reduction would not have happened’. But clearly, if these countries have made these pledges, I think, you know, we have to take them at their word, that they're going to make good on those pledges. We're talking about mitigation that is going to happen anyway. And so the only way you can validly count that as an offset is to, you know, go to the government and basically say, ‘hey, I want to claim this, will you relinquish the claim that you're going to make under your nationally determined contribution, that pledge you've made under the Paris Agreement, and sort it out that way?’ Now, that's a big ask. And this is a huge debate within the voluntary carbon market right now… “People are arguing back and forth whether they really need to go to the national governments to get that, you know, this accounting adjustment, basically. But I would say that without that you don't have a valid offset. There's two ways the market can go. One is basically tap into this architecture that's being negotiated under the Paris agreement for how countries can sort out these conflicting claims and avoid double counting the emission reductions. The alternative is to say, ‘Hey, you know, are offsets really what we mean here? Is there anything really so magical about a carbon offset and becoming carbon neutral, or is what's really valuable simply contributing to global efforts in addressing climate change?’ So, another model here is that a carbon credit wouldn't be an offset, it would simply represent, you know, a verified certified tonne of emission reductions that's contributing to a country's goals, but is not an offset to your own corporate emissions. And I would argue that actually you can make the case for that being a more valuable contribution, right, that kind of investment. ‘This is what I'm doing as a company to help collective efforts on climate change’, rather than, you know, ‘I've got my own little neck of the woods covered with my own carbon footprint’. But that's a huge shift in the paradigm for these markets.”
Watt / What? When I was ten years old, I moved primary school, which was daunting because I had to leave the old school where a view of me had been established, and move to a new school where the conditions of my existence would hinge on the way that I was re-thought. Would I be able to wear the right mask? I settled in okay, as others came towards a set of views about the mask I wore. One day our usual teacher was off, so another teacher covered our class. This other teacher, who I didn’t know, saw me talking when all were supposed to be quiet. She hailed me and made me stand up at my desk. All the others in the class were looking. The teacher told me off. This was embarrassing, especially because I was not used to being told off – I much preferred to stay out of trouble and the play the good kid, without being so much of a sook (a suck-up) that others would call me a teacher’s pet. Now the others were enjoying seeing how I behaved when in trouble and under the spotlight. The teacher asked for my name, so that my misdemeanour could be reported. I replied, ‘Robbie.’ The teacher asked, ‘What’s your second name?’ I replied, ‘Watt.’ Outraged, the teacher exclaimed ‘EXCUSE ME?!’ The class erupted with laughter. Watt is my name, but the teacher heard it as ‘What?’, as insolence. The laughter of the class didn’t help me, it increased my embarrassment. The teacher was confused and still wanted to know my name. She asked again, ‘What’s your second name?’ This was a difficult question for me. I wasn’t sure if she’d asked, ‘What’s your second name?’ or ‘Watt’s your second name?’ I could have replied ‘yes’. Panicked, I opted for: ‘Watt.’ More laughter! It took a while before the situation was resolved – another child bailed us out by explaining my surname. The teacher kept a fairly stern look despite the hilarity of everyone else, and I eventually managed to breathe again. What subjectivity? This memory came to mind when I read Žižek’s latest where he discusses subjectivity in a range of mind-bending ways, very much with a Lacanian perspective. He writes that ‘I exist only insofar as I am another’s fantasy, and I exist insofar as I elude the others’ grasp’. He says I am a ‘lack in the Other’s thought, a lack which is immanent to the thought’. My existence is ‘correlated to being-thought, but being thought incompletely’. Despite the literary and sci-fi illustrations provided, it’s hard to process this - and its seeming contradictions - especially for me as I’m still getting to grips with this outlook. In Watt / What, I tried to wear one symbolic mask by dutifully reporting my name Watt, but I was viewed by the teacher as wearing a different insolent mask, as she heard ‘What?’. It’s an error to think that the real me was the dutiful, whereas the insolent me was false. They are both false, in different ways. Dutiful Watt and insolent What? are views of me by the Other, created through the symbolic order. Both would need to be distinguished from me as a subject, for I am ‘a lack in the Other’s thought’. Although I was more typically known as the dutiful, and commonly displayed such aligned behaviours, this view of ‘me’ is still mis-recognition. In the teacher’s perception of What? she mis-mis-recognised me. Things would have been different if the rest of the class had not been present (1). They laughed at the mis-recognition as if at the comedy of a pantomime, yet they observed with intent to confer judgement on the actors, on the teacher and I, who both realised that our masks were in danger of slipping. That is why I was embarrassed and panicked in the class, for the way in which I was being thought was morphing, second-by-second, and somehow I knew that ‘a subject’s existence is correlated to being-thought’, even if that form of being thought of is always incomplete. Kill the Englishman! The low stakes school example might make the issue seem trivial, so here’s another with some more political and historical significance, also involving a Robert Watt. Not me (Robert/Robbie Watt), but my great-grandfather (Robert/Bert Watt, born 1899). In 1918-19, Bert Watt was stationed in treacherous north Russia with the British army who aligned mostly with the counter-revolutionary Czarist Russians against the Bolsheviks. Bert was involved in maintaining and guarding the railway network near Murmansk. This was a dramatic period in general but there is one story that my grandfather Ronald Watt, Bert’s son, has repeated to me a few times, and which is relevant for this purpose. Ronald wrote the story thus: "Perhaps [Bert’s] greatest danger was on one occasion when his small train stopped for a prolonged period at a wayside halt, where a large number of starving Russians were lurking, hoping to get onto a train towards Murmansk. My father was the guard on this military train and armed only with a pistol he was trying to hold the desperate crowd from rushing the train. A cry went up “kill the Englishman” and in terror at this final indignity my father shouted out “I am not an Englishman, I am a Scotsman”. Strangely this worked like magic on those at the front of the crowd, who said they had good relations with Scottish fishermen and Lerwick was mentioned, and the crowd calmed down. The train suddenly moved off and he was saved." Our family loves this story because my great-grandfather survived, because it shows Bert’s quick-wit, and because the crowd’s forgiveness of him as a Scot helps us distance ourselves, generations later, from the ‘Englishness’ which Scots often misleadingly ascribe to such counter-revolutionary and imperialist military endeavours and colonial enterprises as that which Bert Watt was involved in. For Bert, it would indeed have felt like a ‘final indignity’ to be killed ‘as an Englishman’. If the crowd were to kill him, they could at least mis-recognise him better before doing so. Bert avoided this fate by speaking to the big Other, which drew him into symbolic connection, via nationality, to friendly Scottish fishermen. No longer was Robert Watt just a young man holding a pistol, guarding a train to deny the starving, but a Scotsman (not an Englishman) doing the same. If that story doesn’t convince you that ‘a subject’s existence is correlated to being-thought, but being thought incompletely’, I’m not sure what will. Footnotes (1) I can’t quite fathom what would have happened if it were just me and the teacher, but the stage would be different. Perhaps more deeply this is related to Žižek’s claim in his article, that ‘the minimal number in an intersubjective communication is not two but three. When two meet, they are BOTH divided into their self-experience and their symbolic identity, and this redoubling can only function if a third moment is operative, the big Other which is not reducible to the two.’ (2) Photo of class room by Feliphe Schiarolli . Photo of rail track by Sangga Rima Roman Selia .
A classroom activity that helps us reflect on some fundamentals of human behaviour, global politics, and the climate crisis
The provocative set-up of Calder Szewczak's The Offset is a world where 18-year-olds must barbarically choose a parent to kill in a public execution. The logic of this ‘offset’ by capital punishment is to promote de-population, since resources are scarce. And it gives children, who are assumed to resent being born, the chance to avenge their birthing. The brutal forced choice allows the novel to explore the relations of two female parents and their rebellious but needy child. The characters’ dilemmas and inner conflicts of navigating through dire situations feel chillingly conceivable (no pun intended). The dystopia is strangely credible as it connects with some realities of the present world. The critique of anti-natalism is evident in the novel – the cruelty and ramifications of public parental executions are displayed in their horror – and yet its authors are openly sympathetic towards anti-natalist viewpoints . This probably helped them in presenting to readers the logics that might drive society towards such a ruthless arrangement. Moreover, the meaning of ‘the offset’ is doubled in the book, as it equally connects to efforts to ‘offset’ greenhouse gas emissions that exist in the present day. One of the parents who might be executed is a prominent scientist attempting to grow genetically modified trees in the radioactive wasteland of Greenland. The (deluded) hope in the potential of carbon dioxide removal and academic genius in a future Earth with a seriously depleted environment brings the novel into disturbing conversations with the present.
Derik Broekhoff and Mark Trexler commented on voluntary carbon markets for a Climate Now podcast , where they were interviewed by Katherine Gorman and James Lawler. I don’t agree with the way everything is framed here, but Trexler and Broekhoff, two individuals with a lot of experience in these markets, do raise some important points. I highlight some comments that I broadly agree with and consider important. On Net Zero and carbon offsets “The net zero that you're sort of accomplishing through the individual efforts [through offset claims, etc] … is entirely different from the net zero that we're talking about at a societal level.” (Trexler) “The vast majority of … businesses around the world shouldn't be focusing on net zero, they should be focusing on getting to zero emissions.” (Broekhoff) “There's a big question as to, ‘is this the time to start doing a lot more voluntary stuff, as opposed to figuring out how we rapidly transition to net zero at a societal level?’” (Trexler) Additionality, quality & race to the bottom “We never can know with absolute certainty whether something is additional or not. So, the idea that we have the standards that decide this is additional or not, is sort of misleading from the get-go. In reality, there's a continuum.” (Trexler) “One thing that happens a lot, you start with something additional, but then people bring try and say, ‘Oh, well, I can make some money if I can get all these [non-additional] good deed projects into the market’ [using the newly approved methodology]” (Trexler) “The quality of offsets is on a continuum, from low quality to high quality. And yet, once you're certified as an offset, once you've gotten your project validated, you can claim to be as good as anyone else. And that's a real problem, because then everybody goes for the cheapest stuff. And you end up in a race to the bottom of quality.” (Trexler) Integration with the Paris Agreement A long but effective summary from Broekhoff: “Now, we're in a situation where if you go and invest in mitigation somewhere, whether that's emission reductions, or removing co2 from the atmosphere, there's a good chance that it's covered by one of these national pledges that a national government somewhere has already pledged to make that reduction or make that removal. And so, if you're going to try to claim that as an offset as a company, right, you're basically saying, well, ‘but for my purchase of this carbon credit, that emission reduction would not have happened’. But clearly, if these countries have made these pledges, I think, you know, we have to take them at their word, that they're going to make good on those pledges. We're talking about mitigation that is going to happen anyway. And so the only way you can validly count that as an offset is to, you know, go to the government and basically say, ‘hey, I want to claim this, will you relinquish the claim that you're going to make under your nationally determined contribution, that pledge you've made under the Paris Agreement, and sort it out that way?’ Now, that's a big ask. And this is a huge debate within the voluntary carbon market right now… “People are arguing back and forth whether they really need to go to the national governments to get that, you know, this accounting adjustment, basically. But I would say that without that you don't have a valid offset. There's two ways the market can go. One is basically tap into this architecture that's being negotiated under the Paris agreement for how countries can sort out these conflicting claims and avoid double counting the emission reductions. The alternative is to say, ‘Hey, you know, are offsets really what we mean here? Is there anything really so magical about a carbon offset and becoming carbon neutral, or is what's really valuable simply contributing to global efforts in addressing climate change?’ So, another model here is that a carbon credit wouldn't be an offset, it would simply represent, you know, a verified certified tonne of emission reductions that's contributing to a country's goals, but is not an offset to your own corporate emissions. And I would argue that actually you can make the case for that being a more valuable contribution, right, that kind of investment. ‘This is what I'm doing as a company to help collective efforts on climate change’, rather than, you know, ‘I've got my own little neck of the woods covered with my own carbon footprint’. But that's a huge shift in the paradigm for these markets.”
Watt / What? When I was ten years old, I moved primary school, which was daunting because I had to leave the old school where a view of me had been established, and move to a new school where the conditions of my existence would hinge on the way that I was re-thought. Would I be able to wear the right mask? I settled in okay, as others came towards a set of views about the mask I wore. One day our usual teacher was off, so another teacher covered our class. This other teacher, who I didn’t know, saw me talking when all were supposed to be quiet. She hailed me and made me stand up at my desk. All the others in the class were looking. The teacher told me off. This was embarrassing, especially because I was not used to being told off – I much preferred to stay out of trouble and the play the good kid, without being so much of a sook (a suck-up) that others would call me a teacher’s pet. Now the others were enjoying seeing how I behaved when in trouble and under the spotlight. The teacher asked for my name, so that my misdemeanour could be reported. I replied, ‘Robbie.’ The teacher asked, ‘What’s your second name?’ I replied, ‘Watt.’ Outraged, the teacher exclaimed ‘EXCUSE ME?!’ The class erupted with laughter. Watt is my name, but the teacher heard it as ‘What?’, as insolence. The laughter of the class didn’t help me, it increased my embarrassment. The teacher was confused and still wanted to know my name. She asked again, ‘What’s your second name?’ This was a difficult question for me. I wasn’t sure if she’d asked, ‘What’s your second name?’ or ‘Watt’s your second name?’ I could have replied ‘yes’. Panicked, I opted for: ‘Watt.’ More laughter! It took a while before the situation was resolved – another child bailed us out by explaining my surname. The teacher kept a fairly stern look despite the hilarity of everyone else, and I eventually managed to breathe again. What subjectivity? This memory came to mind when I read Žižek’s latest where he discusses subjectivity in a range of mind-bending ways, very much with a Lacanian perspective. He writes that ‘I exist only insofar as I am another’s fantasy, and I exist insofar as I elude the others’ grasp’. He says I am a ‘lack in the Other’s thought, a lack which is immanent to the thought’. My existence is ‘correlated to being-thought, but being thought incompletely’. Despite the literary and sci-fi illustrations provided, it’s hard to process this - and its seeming contradictions - especially for me as I’m still getting to grips with this outlook. In Watt / What, I tried to wear one symbolic mask by dutifully reporting my name Watt, but I was viewed by the teacher as wearing a different insolent mask, as she heard ‘What?’. It’s an error to think that the real me was the dutiful, whereas the insolent me was false. They are both false, in different ways. Dutiful Watt and insolent What? are views of me by the Other, created through the symbolic order. Both would need to be distinguished from me as a subject, for I am ‘a lack in the Other’s thought’. Although I was more typically known as the dutiful, and commonly displayed such aligned behaviours, this view of ‘me’ is still mis-recognition. In the teacher’s perception of What? she mis-mis-recognised me. Things would have been different if the rest of the class had not been present (1). They laughed at the mis-recognition as if at the comedy of a pantomime, yet they observed with intent to confer judgement on the actors, on the teacher and I, who both realised that our masks were in danger of slipping. That is why I was embarrassed and panicked in the class, for the way in which I was being thought was morphing, second-by-second, and somehow I knew that ‘a subject’s existence is correlated to being-thought’, even if that form of being thought of is always incomplete. Kill the Englishman! The low stakes school example might make the issue seem trivial, so here’s another with some more political and historical significance, also involving a Robert Watt. Not me (Robert/Robbie Watt), but my great-grandfather (Robert/Bert Watt, born 1899). In 1918-19, Bert Watt was stationed in treacherous north Russia with the British army who aligned mostly with the counter-revolutionary Czarist Russians against the Bolsheviks. Bert was involved in maintaining and guarding the railway network near Murmansk. This was a dramatic period in general but there is one story that my grandfather Ronald Watt, Bert’s son, has repeated to me a few times, and which is relevant for this purpose. Ronald wrote the story thus: "Perhaps [Bert’s] greatest danger was on one occasion when his small train stopped for a prolonged period at a wayside halt, where a large number of starving Russians were lurking, hoping to get onto a train towards Murmansk. My father was the guard on this military train and armed only with a pistol he was trying to hold the desperate crowd from rushing the train. A cry went up “kill the Englishman” and in terror at this final indignity my father shouted out “I am not an Englishman, I am a Scotsman”. Strangely this worked like magic on those at the front of the crowd, who said they had good relations with Scottish fishermen and Lerwick was mentioned, and the crowd calmed down. The train suddenly moved off and he was saved." Our family loves this story because my great-grandfather survived, because it shows Bert’s quick-wit, and because the crowd’s forgiveness of him as a Scot helps us distance ourselves, generations later, from the ‘Englishness’ which Scots often misleadingly ascribe to such counter-revolutionary and imperialist military endeavours and colonial enterprises as that which Bert Watt was involved in. For Bert, it would indeed have felt like a ‘final indignity’ to be killed ‘as an Englishman’. If the crowd were to kill him, they could at least mis-recognise him better before doing so. Bert avoided this fate by speaking to the big Other, which drew him into symbolic connection, via nationality, to friendly Scottish fishermen. No longer was Robert Watt just a young man holding a pistol, guarding a train to deny the starving, but a Scotsman (not an Englishman) doing the same. If that story doesn’t convince you that ‘a subject’s existence is correlated to being-thought, but being thought incompletely’, I’m not sure what will. Footnotes (1) I can’t quite fathom what would have happened if it were just me and the teacher, but the stage would be different. Perhaps more deeply this is related to Žižek’s claim in his article, that ‘the minimal number in an intersubjective communication is not two but three. When two meet, they are BOTH divided into their self-experience and their symbolic identity, and this redoubling can only function if a third moment is operative, the big Other which is not reducible to the two.’ (2) Photo of class room by Feliphe Schiarolli . Photo of rail track by Sangga Rima Roman Selia .
