A travel agent is ditching an offer allowing holidaymakers to pay extra if they feel guilty about the greenhouse gases created by their flights, saying it’s like selling “medieval pardons”.

responsibletravel.com said it was dropping carbon offsets from its website, bucking an industry trend of recent years.

Ever more airlines and travel groups offer customers the option of paying a bit more to plant trees in Africa, for instance, or to help build a wind farm in India to soak up greenhouse gases equal to those emitted by their vacations.

“We believe that the travel industry’s priority must be to reduce carbon emissions, rather than to offset,” said Justin Francis, managing director of the British-based firm.

“Carbon offsets distract tourists from the need to reduce their emissions. They create a ‘medieval pardon’ for us to carry on behaving in the same way (or worse),” he said.

The company said: “In 2002 we were the first travel agent to offer carbon offsetting, in 2009 we believe we are one of the first to stop offering offsets to customers.”

The firm said it agreed with environmental group Friends of the Earth that offsets were a “dangerous distraction”.  “Ultimately we need to reduce our carbon emissions. We can do this by flying less – travelling by train or taking holidays closer to home for example, and by making carbon reductions in other areas of our lifestyles too, alongside travel,” it said.

Criticising travel — rather than selling letting people buy indulgences for a high-carbon lifestyle — sounds like shooting yourself in the foot if you are selling holidays.

Or is this a smart decision?

If you feel proud about having planted a tree sometime to help protect the environment, you may have to think again.

Pakistan has apparently set a record for tree plantings, with volunteers planting about 1,800 mangroves each in a day in mud and temperatures of up to 37 Celsius, according to the WWF International conservation group. 

Maybe such competitions will catch on if a new U.N. climate treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December includes measures to combat deforestation. Trees soak up greenhouse gases as they grow and release them when they burn or rot.

According to a WWF statement, 300 volunteers planted 541,176 young mangroves without any mechanical equipment in the Indus River Delta, about 150 km south east of Karachi. That beat the previous Guinness World Record of 447,874 trees in a day held by India, it says.

“We hope that tree planting competitions will become as popular as cricket matches,” Richard Garstang, head of WWF Pakistan Wetlands Programme, said in the statement. Mangroves provide homes for creatures such as shrimps and lobsters and help protect coasts from tsunamis.

Planting mangroves is labour intensive (you can’t cheat by simply throwing thousands of seeds into the air or quickly jabbing a sapling into the ground). The picture above left shows a mangrove being planted in Indonesia earlier this year.

Tree plantings have taken off in recent years — Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai (right, with the spade) won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, partly for leading a campaign that had planted 20 million trees in Africa.

At the time, 20 million sounded like a lot of trees.

In 2006, the U.N. Environment Programme launched a “billion tree campaign” for world plantings by the end of 2007. That goal was surpassed and has been raised to 7 billion by the end of 2009 . It says plantings of 6.3 billion trees have now been pledged (although no one goes round checking to see if they really get planted, or keep growing).

Deforestation still far outstrips growth of new trees in the tropics — about 20 percent of world greenhouse gases come from the loss of trees, mostly burnt to clear land for farming in places such as the Amazon or Congo basins.

So the world probably needs more 1,800-a-day planters.

And can anyone beat that number?

(Picture credits: Top: A worker plants a mangrove tree at a conservation garden in Jakarta to mark Earth Day — April 22, 2009. REUTERS/Dadang Tri. Right: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai plants a tree helped by the Rev. Timothy Njoya (L) after returning from Norway with her prize, Nairobi, Dec. 30, 2004. REUTERS/Radu Sigheti)

A “gold-rush-like” buzz has spread across Germany in the last week over tentative plans to invest the staggering sum of 400 billion euros to harvest solar power in the Sahara for energy users across Europe and northern Africa. Even though European and Mediterranean Union leaders have been exploring and studying for several years the idea of using concentrated solar power (CSP), the Desertec proposition suddenly captivated the public’s attention a week ago when German reinsurer Munich Re announced it had invited blue chip German companies such as Deutsche Bank, Siemens and several major utilities to a July 13 meeting on the project. The 20 companies aim to sign a memorandum of understanding to found the Desertec Industrial Initiative that could be supplying 15 percent of Europe’s electricity in the decades ahead.

Germany’s deputy foreign minister, Guenter Gloser, has been the government’s point man for the project. I had the chance to talk to him about it.

Question: How did this project to turn the sun in the Sahara into electricity for Europe and north African countries get started?
Guenter Gloser: About 15 months ago Germany and France proposed including the solar plan into the list of projects for the Union for the Mediterranean. There were institutions that had already done research and we thought: ‘Why don’t we use this sun belt where there is such an abundance of sunshine as a source of renewable energy?’ Together Germany, France and Egypt put forth this solar plan as one of the six projects for the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and underscored the fact that it could benefit both sides. It was not an idea where just countries north of the Mediterranean will benefit but rather those countries south of it as well as across the EU would also benefit.

Question: What is the current status of the project?
Gloser: We agreed to move forward with the project and want to go forward step-by-step towards its implementation. But obviously neither the EU nor the Arab League will be the principal players but rather private investors. Our task for this project is to create the political framework — for example with setting up of the feed-in tariffs, ensuring the infrastructure is built and ensuring that the renewable energy can be transported to Europe. The political framework can also make it possible to expedite the approvals process. But what is also very important is that the energy produced is also available for countries in the region. For example, Morocco can take advantage of its solar and wind conditions on the Atlantic coast to build solar power plants or wind energy parks to provide energy for its domestic market and to sell energy abroad as well. Even countries such as Algeria, which has fossil fuel reserves, could also use the sun belt for solar thermal power for some of their energy needs — and prolong their fossil fuel reserves.

Question: Is there not risk involved in such large-scale investment in a region with a potential for political instability?
Gloser: It’s a cooperation that will contribute towards diversifying energy sources, geographically and in terms of energy sources. It’s a truly fascinating project because it’s a win-win for everyone. And the third winner will be the people and institutions that finance this project. Neither the EU nor the countries in the south are capable of financing this on their own. So the question is: can third-parties bringing financing be involved. Energy security is an important issue everywhere. There are energy sources we have today that at times have been somewhat at risk. There’s no contradiction in saying that it’s important to diversify a country’s energy source as well as diversifying the types of energy it receives. It’s not that there is no risk whatsoever but it’s important to keep in mind that there are also some risk factors for other sources of energy that we are now importing.

Question: What impact do you think a project like this could have in the Mediterranean Union?
Gloser: I think the partnership approach that we have taken could well have a positive influence of stability for the countries taking part as well as the neighbouring nations. The EU has been enlarged and come closer together in the past decades but there hasn’t been as much of that among Arab countries. Perhaps it would be possible through certain projects, such as this solar energy project or water projects or transportation routes, to increase the cooperation among those countries.

Question: There have been fears expressed that Europe would be exploiting natural resources in Africa, raising fears of a new sort of ‘colonisation’. What would you say to those fears?
Gloser: It is not in any way an issue of the north dominating the south. It is not only the north that is interested in acquiring renewable energy but rather other users are interested. And if that mutual need for energy leads to a project that satisfies all sides then that is in my view a good route to take. I don’t think there’s any justification for the notion of this being an ‘energy colonisation’ or anything like that at all. It’s a mutually beneficial project.”

Question: How high is the interest in other countries? Some cynics would say Germany’s expertise in renewable energies gives it a big advantage.
Gloser: So far the countries in the south and north have been in agreement about the project. Now the task is to identify the next steps. There are countries in both the south and north that are more interested in the project than others — because, for example, they already have had positive experiences with renewable energy. That is not only Germany but also Spain and other countries. And on the other side of the Mediterranean there are countries that will have more interest at first than others.

Question: Some might see this project somewhat cynically as a vehicle to help German companies that already have such a considerable head start in know-how with renewable energy. What would you say to them?
Gloser: Obviously there are some important players (in Germany). But they are not only in Germany. Certainly we have built up a renewable energy sector in Germany, thanks to the right political framework a decade ago, that has created an enormous number of jobs. But Spain has also had an enormous development in recent years and in Denmark the wind energy sector has reached a large dimension with considerable know-how. But beyond those countries there are many other countries with companies and suppliers for the industry.

Question: Are there problems on the horizon being overlooked?
Gloser: In my eyes the biggest problem right now is that the expectations have possibly been raised too high. I’m someone who’s thought: that’s a great idea and why don’t we take advantage of all these things at hand: know-how, sun belt, political cooperation, development, stability, security, partnership. There are so many positive aspects that come together. Now it’s time to come up with some realistic timetables and see how we can move forward step-by-step to make this project a reality.

PHOTO: Mirrors are seen channelling sunlight onto a tube filled with oil during the dedication of Acciona’s Nevada Solar One power plant in Boulder City, southeast of Las Vegas February 22, 2008. The 400-acre, 64-megawatt, concentrating solar power (CSP) plant is the third largest in the world, according to Acciona. The plant produces energy to power about 14,000 homes. REUTERS/Las Vegas Sun/Steve Marcus

French President Nicolas Sarkozy declares “nuclear is dead”; Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is taken to hospital suffering from “confetti inhalation” and “hug-related injuries” after they agree to a historic U.N. deal to curb greenhouse gases in Copenhagen.

At least that’s part of the wishful thinking behind a spoof December 19, 2009 edition of the International Herald Tribune (left) showing a beaming German Chancellor Angela Merkel flanked by Sarkozy (left) and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso above the headline “heads of state agree historic climate-saving deal”.

Among other headlines in the 8-page edition sponsored by environmental group Greenpeace: “Markets soar on news of Copenhagen climate deal”, “Exxon finally comes clean” (by abandoning oil and shifting to renewable energies), “Atmosphere named world heritage site”, “India turns its back on the carbon economy”, “Amazon forest a big winner in Denmark”.

The newspaper imagines that that the deal was successful after the European Union agreed at a summit (starting today in the real world) to contribute $50 billion a year to help developing nations combat climate change, matched by a pledge by U.S. President Barack Obama in December to give $60 billion.

Of course the signs so far are that the real life headlines will be less enthusiastic at the end of the December U.N. conference about a new deal to succeed the existing Kyoto Protocol: promises for cuts in greenhouse gases by rich nations are well short of the paper’s imaginary curbs to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times. And neither the European Union nor the United States are talking about so much cash.

The Kyoto Protocol fell well short of green groups’ expectations — to the right is a copy of the (real) Japan Times the day after the Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 — below the main headline “Conference adopts Kyoto Protocol” is another article “Kyoto Convention’s success open to debate”.

So what will the real headlines read on December 19?  (Assuming the delegates finish the conference by then?)

Please give us your suggestions…

West Virginians who want to show off their pride in the state’s coal industry can now do so via some catchy, coal-promoting ringtones put together by the West Virginia Coal Association.

Beware, however, that the ringtones have already drawn the ire of environmentalists.

The ringtones are jingles the West Virginia coal group has used for some time to promote the state’s vast coal resources (and presumably to offset the bad rap coal gets for producing about 30 percent of the nation’s greenhouse gases).

Below are some of the lyrics:

Coal is WestVirginia/ Coal is me and you/ Coal is West Virginia / We’ve got a job to do/ Coal is energy (coal is energy)/ We need energy (we need energy)/ Coal is West Virginia

And:

When we go down deep through the dark today/ We come up wth a light for America

For all the ringtones’ optimism, however, they are taking heat from environmental group the Sierra Club, which put together a video called “Coal Was West Virginia” that denigrates coal as dirty and a threat to the environment while the mobile phone jingles play in the background.  You can check it out below:

Photo Credit: Reuters/Andrea Hopkins (Retired miner Chuck Nelson, 57, surveys a mountaintop removal coal mine on Kayford Mountain, West Virginia)

“If you liked credit derivatives swaps, you’re going to love cap-and-trade.”

One can presume that Chevron Chief Executive David O’Reilly is not a fan of the current deep worldwide recession — which was worsened by a credit-market lockup blamed in part on hard-to-value securities.

And, he made it very clear on Thursday that he is not enamored of the system the Obama administration hopes to use to reduce U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, which are produced through the burning of fossil fuels sold by the No. 2 U.S. oil and gas company.

“It’s smoke and mirrors,” O’Reilly told a Boston business group. “Personally, I think it’s going to be a difficult system. I don’t think the American people trust it.”

A proposal working its way through the U.S. Congress would put in a place a cap-and-trade system that would give individual U.S. companies the right to emit certain quantities of greenhouse gases, which contribute to global climate change. Companies whose emissions are below their allotment could sell their extra rights to other companies.

The Obama administration in its budget proposal released on Thursday called for the initial emissions permits to be sold, rather than given away free. That would give businesses a financial incentive to reduce their emissions.

O’Reilly argued that an easier way to reduce emissions would be to raise taxes paid on gasoline for cars. He said Washington has embraced cap-and-trade to avoid the appearance of raising taxes.

“Politicians like it because they don’t like to talk about taxes,” O’Reilly said.

It was a bad week to be planning a coal-fired power plant in the United States.

The industry suffered its second blow of the week on Friday with the cancellation of a plant in Michigan. The move by power plant developer LS Power marks the ninth such plant to be dropped in the United States so far this year, according to a count by environmental group the Sierra Club.

The company blamed regulatory uncertainty and the weak economy for the cancellation, which environmentalists cheered because coal-fired power plants are responsible for more than 30 percent of the United States’ global warming emissions.

The Michigan plant cancellation wasn’t the first blow to coal this week, either. On Tuesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency withdrew a permit for a massive coal-fired plant in New Mexico that would have been built on an Indian reservation.

The announcements came within two weeks after the Obama administration opened the way to regulating greenhouse gas emissions by declaring them a danger to human health.

Mandated limits on greenhouse gases, which the U.S. could adopt as early as this year, are certain to deal a further blow to new coal-fired plants. The U.S. Department of Energy’s statistical arm, however, expects coal to provide the largest share of U.S. electric generation for years to come, making up 47 percent of the nation’s power generation in 2030.

What do you think is the future of coal-fired power in the United States?

Photo credit: Reuters/Staff Photographer (Southern Company’s Plant Bowen in Cartersville, Georgia, one of the biggest coal-fired plants in the United States)

The Obama administration’s move to declare climate-warming carbon pollution a danger to human health was quickly hailed by environmental groups and leading liberals as a long-overdue shift from the Bush era and a historic first step toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

In making the announcement, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson said that solving the problem would not only clean up the air but also “create millions of green jobs and end our country’s dependence on foreign oil.”

She says the way to do it is for Congress to pass comprehensive climate change legislation while at the same time averting a “regulatory thicket” that unduly burdens governments and businesses.

But announcing that greenhouse gases are bad and getting the likes of the Natural Resources Defense Council and Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to agree with you is the easy part.

 Manufacturers and industry groups, concerned that they will end up shouldering the cost of cleaning up the atmosphere, were wary.

And, speaking of thickets, it will be no easy task getting such monumental policy change as a renewable portfolio standard for utilities, a cap-and-trade program or a carbon tax through Congress during an economic recession.

So, what do you think?  Do you agree with the EPA?  Can Obama get it done during a recession?  Should he? What do you expect him to do first? And if you had his ear, what would be tops on your wish list?

Top photo: Reuters/ Lucy Nicholson (the Los Angeles skyline)

Bottom photo: Reuters/ Fred Prouser (a downtown Los Angeles freeway)

The current issue of the American magazine Foreign Affairs has a thought-provoking piece that asks if the geoengineering option shouldn’t be used as a last resort in the battle against climate change. You can see the introduction to the article here (but will need to be a registered user to read all of it online).

 Climate geoengineering is a thinly explored branch of science which to date has seen little in the way of peer-reviewed research. Some of its advocates envision global systems which would launch reflective particles into the atmosphere or position sunshades to cool the earth.

Another approach is to dump iron dust into the sea to spur the growth of algae that absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the air. When algae die, they fall to the seabed and so remove carbon.

We’ve done stories on these and related topics before which you can read here and here.

Part of the controversy around the subject stems from the fact that many environmentalists and policy-makers view geoengineering as an “easy fix” that governments might be tempted to take instead of the hard option of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Many scientists have been reluctant to raise the issue for fear that it might create a moral hazard: encouraging governments to deploy geoengineering rather than invest in cutting emissions,” write the authors, who include David G. Victor of Stanford Law School and M. Granger Morgan, director of the Climate Decision Making Center.

There are also concerns about unforeseen side effects — a worry with almost any new technology that is perhaps greater when humanity intentionally tampers with the environment.

But the authors argue that the challenge of climate change is too great not to try everything at our disposal.

“Humans have already engaged in a dangerous geophysical exercise by pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The best and safest strategy for reversing climate change is to halt this buildup … but this solution will take time,” they say.

“Meanwhile, the dangers are mounting. In a few decades, the option of geoengineering could look less ugly for some countries than unchecked changes in the climate.”

It is noteworthy that this argument has been made in the pages of Foreign Affairs, which is sober, influential and often features analysts who are ahead of the curve. This alone signals that geoengineering is emerging from the fringe.

What do you think? Is geoengineering an option that should be used in the struggle against climate change? Or do the risks outweigh any possible benefits?

(Photo: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10, 2008. Could geoengineering be used to help stop climate change consequences such as melting sea ice?  REUTERS/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio/Handout (UNITED STATES)

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”; this is a reply to a blog by Holman Jenkins, a Wall Street Journal columnist and member of the WSJ editorial board. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

Mr. Jenkins replies that the clarification of his perplexing column is reiteration of his original sentence “…We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability…”

He still doesn’t say where his ‘most plausible indication’ comes from except for his reference to some unnamed : “ … many scientists who have pursued empirical results [that] show the human contribution [has] been …maddeningly elusive or indeterminate.”

By contrast, I have no hesitation to say I was referring to IPCC when quoting the 90% confidence attribution of warming to human activities.

With regard to the first part of his dismissal of the present impact of CO2 on our climate, this has been the focus of core IPCC studies for many years and is called the ‘radiative forcing’ of the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial times (e.g. 1750). This is the energy imbalance created in the atmosphere by a factor such as greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar energy, clouds, land use. The resulting bar chart (see figure below) is famous. CO2 dominates the chart and is estimated in 2005 to be contributing a +1.66 Watts/square meter positive imbalance, greater than any other forcing, including solar by five times.

The point is Mr. Jenkins says I misread his statement about science not knowing “…how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate …” But I responded directly to this claim when I wrote he is effectively saying we know nothing about how “CO2 affects … Earth’s energy balance” — I was referring to the energy imbalance chart shown above and the +1.66 Watts/square meter forcing.

Also, current warming from CO2 isn’t the only thing we ‘actually care’ about.

Here are at least three other scientific issues and facts about CO2 that will have major implications for society and the environment, even if Mr. Jenkins does not care about them: (i) how high will CO2 levels go if Mr. Jenkins had his way ? 700 ppm ? 1000 ppm ?; (ii) the atmospheric CO2 excess we are creating will last 100’s to 1000’s of years into the future; (iii) as excess CO2 dissolves in the oceans it is acidifying them and will adversely impact marine life worldwide.

Since Mr. Jenkins raises the ‘global warming has stopped’ claim, 2008 was the ninth warmest year on record since 1880 and the 10 warmest years on record have occurred between 1997-2008.

Moreover right now we are in a cool phase of both the 11-year sunspot cycle and also the cool phase of the powerful oceanic El Nino cycle so it’s not surprising that the last few years haven’t broken all-time records. The sunspot and El Nino cycles will turn around and warm again. Meanwhile CO2 and other greenhouse gases continue to grow unabated.

Mr. Jenkins seems strangely unaware that the warming of the 20th century has coincided with 20th century increases in CO2. Also the current rate of CO2 and other greenhouse gases increases are extraordinarily unprecedented during the last 2000 years of human civilization (see figure below), which is no doubt the most important period to consider for modern society.

I called attention to Mr. Jenkins use of “contribution” because it is a peculiar word to use to describe something that is wholly due to human activities, unless you want to leave the door open in reader’s minds that natural emissions are playing a significant role in the observed increases. Skeptics try to confuse the public about this by saying that since natural fluxes of CO2 from the ocean and biosphere are larger than human emissions, our emissions can’t be significant. But these fluxes have been tightly in balance over the last few thousand years as seen from ice core data for example (below). More importantly, Mr. Jenkins still doesn’t fully acknowledge this fact about the cause of today’s CO2 rise.