Double jeopardy: carbon offsets and human rights abuses.

• Author: Checker, Melissa
• Position: Pulse of the Planet - Essay

Whether you're a climate change denier or doomsayer, an avid recycler or rabid consumer of plastic bottles, there is one very good but little-known reason to oppose carbon offsets: their immediate and dire human costs. Offset opponents have always maintained that using them to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is like trying to lose weight by paying someone else to go on a diet. But I argue that even more critical is that fact that such proxy schemes present human dangers on both sides of the equation.

Briefly, offsets are based on the idea that greenhouse gases mix rapidly throughout Earth's atmosphere--fewer emitted in one place make up for greater emissions someplace else. Offsets originated with the Kyoto Protocol. In order to make carbon reductions more palatable, Kyoto negotiators established the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) by which industries in developed nations could cut their emissions by investing in programs in developing nations that reduce, avoid, or sequester CO2 or other greenhouse gases in some other place. As an extra bonus, those programs were also supposed to stimulate sustainable development.

Offsets rapidly became a popular alternative for industries unwilling or unable to reduce their own emissions. Experts predict that the CDM will deliver more than half of the European Union's planned carbon reductions to 2020. In addition, a secondary carbon offset market (known as "the voluntary market") for individual consumers and businesses not obligated by Kyoto reached $705 million in 2008. With the likely passage of the US climate change bill, those numbers are expected to skyrocket.

But mounting evidence shows that carbon offset projects often create more problems then they solve for the communities that host them. Moreover, an exclusive focus on greenhouse gas emissions means that other highly toxic releases are often overlooked. I recently compiled some of these findings and took them a step further by tracking the path of offsets generated by some well-known projects from the site of their production to the industries they benefited. As it turns out, the trail of carbon offsets might be washed in green, but from start to finish it is lined with human rights violations.

From the mountains of Uganda to the mountains of US Appalachia

Mount Elgon, Uganda, offers one of the more well-documented examples of an offset project that went awry for a local community. But further research reveals that problematic human rights issues extend far beyond Mount Elgon, all the way to the US Appalachian states.

The case begins in the Netherlands in 1990 when the Dutch Electricity Generating Board vowed to surpass Kyoto Treaty goals partly through...