Is Al Gore Really "Carbon Neutral"?
The contest between CO2 Puritans and CO2 Pragmatists

16 Aug 2006 in Regulatory Science, Regulatory Economics, Regulatory Policy, Information Quality

In a recent news article about his book and movie An Inconvenient Truth, Al and Tipper Gore are said to have adopted a "carbon neutral" lifestyle. We wondered what that meant and performed some research before posting a discussion on the subject. We learned that there are two schools of environmentalist thought on this. One camp (call it the "CO2 Puritans") advise people to maximize their personal reductions in CO2 emissions. Another camp (call it the "CO2 Pragmatists") advise people to purchase carbon offsets, which are investments in projects that reduce carbon emissions elsewhere. CO2 Puritans say purchasing offsets is like buying a "right to pollute," whereas CO2 Pragmatists say buying offsets will achieve reduced- and no-carbon technologies more quickly.

In this case, both camps are right. Purchasing offsets is very nearly the same thing as buying a "right to emit CO2." But purchasing carbon offsets clearly offers a faster path toward reduced-carbon energy technologies by subsidizing the development and use of new technology. One thing is sure: It may be hard to avoid emitting carbon from your daily activities, but it's easy to purchase carbon offsets marketed by various NGOs. We've found NGOs willing to sell carbon offsets to consumers for as little as $10 per ton of CO2.

Now comes Peter Schweizer in USA Today who takes the former vice president to task for hypocrisy — advising others to behave as CO2 Puritans while behaving himself as a CO2 Pragmatist. A Technorati search today yields 99 blog postings that pick apart various threads of Schweizer's op-ed and Gore's behavior.

What useful knowledge can be gleaned from this controversy?

THE GORES' RESIDENTIAL "CARBON NEUTRALITY"

According to Schweizer, the Gores own three homes: a 10,000-square-foot home in Nashville, Tennessee; a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Virginia (across the Potomac River from Washington, DC); and a third home of undisclosed size in Carthage, Tennessee. Neutral Source has verified the Gores own a 2.1 acre property at 312 Lynnwood Blvd. in the Belle Meade section of Nashville, Tennessee (Parcel ID 11611005600). Its assessed value in January 2005 was $3 million, but we have not been able to validate Schweizer's claims about its size. So we performed a search and found 15 single-family homes on the market in the Gores' Nashville neighborhood with asking prices of $3 million or more. Of the 298 neighborhood properties on the market, only three are listed at $3 million or more. According to MLS data, these houses are 9.727, 7,340, and 9,878 square feet respectively. So we can confirm that it's quite plausible that the Gores' Nashville home is, as Schweizer claims, 10,000 square feet.

Property records in Arlington, Virginia cannot be searched by owner's name, and property records in Carthage, Tennessee, cannot be searched online. So we are unable to validate Schweizer's reasonable claim that the Gores' Virginia home is 4,000 square feet, nor can we say anything at all about their home in Carthage, Tennessee.

Table 951 of the Statistical Abstract of the United States reports median square footage of single family detached homes is 1,708 square feet. Assuming Schweizer's figures are true and that the Gores' Carthage property is median-sized, then extrapolating based solely on square footage, the Gores' expected residential carbon output would be about 9.2 times that of the median homeowner. CarbonCounter.org says the "average" single family home emits 26.15 tons of carbon dioxide, but its FAQ page does not define "average" and, as we noted in our previous post, CarbonCounter's estimates are overly precise given the large uncertainties involved.

Still, a rough approximation of the Gores' residential CO2 emissions can be obtained by assuming that CarbonCounter's "average" really means "median." This yields 26 tons x 9.2 = 239 tons CO2 per year. CarbonCounter will "offset" the Gores' CO2 emissions for a contribution of $10 per ton, and certainly they can afford the $2,390 contribution that CarbonCounter says will buy residential "carbon neutrality." But actually making a large reduction in CO2 emissions from 17,000 square feet of residential living space would be both very challenging technically, and much more expensive. The Gores are easily capable of being CO2 Pragmatists with respect to residential carbon neutrality, but they cannot be CO2 Puritans without completely abandoning their lifestyle.

AIR TRAVEL "CARBON NEUTRALITY"

Schweizer says Gore travels by private jet to promote his book and movie, a commonplace enough phenomenon among celebrities, wealthy individuals, and politicians, Neutral Source has been unable to locate credible estimates of CO2 emissions from private aircraft. Both CarbonCounter and CarbonFund estimate CO2 emissions from commercial air travel by dividing total aircraft emissions across large numbers of passengers. This would significantly understate Gore's CO2 emissions from air travel because small private aircraft emit more CO2 per passenger simply because they haul fewer passengers.

But we can get some interesting approximations through the back door.

SAS provides an intriguing aircraft emission calculator for commercial aircraft in its own fleet. According to WebFlyer's airline distance calculator, a flight from Copenhagen to London's Stansted Airport (a route SAS flies with several different aircraft) is 567 miles. The distance from Nashville Metro Airport to Washington's Reagan National Airport is 560 miles. For the aircraft SAS has in service on the Copenhagen to London Stansted route, their calculator estimates CO2 emissions ranging from 94.1 kg (207 lbs) per passenger for the Airbus 321 to 139 kilograms (306 lbs) per passenger for the MD 87, a difference of about 50%.

An important caveat: These estimates are based on on assumed 70% cabin load factor, so the less crowded the flight the greater is each passenger's share of the flight's CO2 emissions. A full A-321 yields 66 kg (146 lbs) CO2 per passenger, but a 35% full MD-81/82 yields 279 kg (615 lbs) CO2 per passenger. Alternatively, a full MD 87 emits 102 kg ( lbs) CO2 per passenger. The fuel efficient A-321 emits more CO2 per passenger if its cabin load factor drops below 68%. Still, a dedicated CO2 Puritan (and there seems to be no other subspecies) can make the effort to be well informed about the relative CO2 emissions of alternative aircraft and take into account the flight's load factor. CO2 Puritans can significantly reduce their relative carbon footprint by choosing to fly on full, fuel-efficient aircraft.

Life is easier for the CO2 Pragmatist, who can pay CarbonCounter an amount between $0.73 and $1.40 to buy a carbon offset. Indeed, at $10 per ton, it costs only about $120 to offset all of the 11.8 tons (10,682 kg) CO2 emitted by an A-321 flying from Copenhagen to London Stansted (or Nashville Metro to Reagan National), a small fraction of the cost of upgrading to first class.

Herein lies the crux of the conflict between CO2 Puritans and CO2 Pragmatists. Flying on cramped airliners is unpleasant even when seatmates don't spill their coffee on you, wear too much perfume or cologne, hog the armrests, or hold otherwise charming babies on their laps. Flying on nearly empty airliners can make even significant turbulence bearable. Pragmatists will cheerfully pay a more that the couple bucks it takes to offset the additional carbon emitted by being comfortable.

PRIVATE AIR TRAVEL "CARBON NEUTRALITY"

It is impossible to be a CO2 Puritan and fly on chartered private aircraft. How hard is it to be a CO2 Pragmatist?

Flightplan, a UK-based private aircraft charter brokerage, announced on August 8 that it now practices "carbon neutrality":

Flightplan have joined forces with Climate Care, an international organisation set up in 1998 to tackle climate change by reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Using a scale of charges calculated by the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, Flightplan will offset the emissions of their client's flights by contributing to Climate Care's renewable energy, forest restoration and energy efficiency projects around the world.

According to Climate Care's emission calculator, the flight from Copenhagen to London Stansted (or Nashville Metro to Reagan National) emits 0.11 metric tons (246 lbs) of CO2, an amount that is in the middle of the 207—306 kg range obtained from the SAS calculator. Climate Care also says offsetting this amount of carbon costs £0.82—$1.55 at today's exchange rate, or $14 per ton. Clearly, this is a trivial sum compared to both the commercial airfare and the cost of chartering a private jet from Flightplan. Flightplan says that its contributions to Climate Care come from its own income and are not passed on as higher prices to its customers, and this claim appears to be quite plausible given the trivial cost of the offset.

One reason the offset is so inexpensive is that Flightplan relies on conversion rates from commercial aircraft that understate the per capita CO2 emissions from travel on private aircraft. So perhaps it's better to view Flightplan's program as a marketing campaign targeted at CO2 Pragmatists who are more interested in feeling good about themselves than in paying full price for carbon offsets.

What does it take to offset the actual CO2 emissions from small private aircraft? Flightplan's fleet ranges from 5-passenger Piper Senecas to 14-passenger Gulfstream G-Vs. We hazard an estimate based on the Piper Seneca, an airplane very similar to (but probably more fuel-efficient than) the smallest fixed-wing aircraft in its fleet.

The Piper has a 812 nautical mile range (934 statute miles) on 122 usable gallons of fuel, or 6.66 (nautical) miles per gallon. (A nautical mile is 1,832 meters, whereas a statute mile is approximately 1,609 meters. We assume that WebFlyer calculates nautical miles, but have not been able to verify that.)

Our Nashville Metro to Washington National flight is 567 miles. The Energy Information Administration says burning a gallon of aviation gasoline emits 18.355 pounds of CO2. Excluding the special demands of takeoff and landing (accounted for by SAS but not by us) implies that for this flight the Piper burns at least 73 gallons of aviation fuel and emits at least 1,340 lbs CO2. Given the uncertainties in our estimate, we're more comfortable with the rule of thumb that a 500 mile private flight emits about a ton of CO2.

NEUTRALIZING GORE'S AIR TRAVEL CO2 EMISSIONS

So if Gore were to travel by Piper Seneca V to promote his book and movie, he'd have about a ton of CO2 to offset for every 500 miles. That's two tons per 500-mile round trip. Although he cannot travel this way and be a CO2 Puritan, CarbonCounter would charge just $20 to offset two tons of CO2. Given the cost of private chartered aircraft, this amount that qualifies as extraordinarily weak noise in the price signal. So it's incredibly easy for him to be a CO2 Pragmatist.

Schweizer says that Paramount Classics, the distributor of Gore's movie, pays to offset the former vice president's carbon emissions from private air travel. He implies that Gore is dodging the responsibility for offsetting his own emissions while inveighing against the emissions of others. But at $10 per ton, this surely would not be a serious burden to Gore if he paid the bill himself. A check to CarbonCounter in the amount of $2,000 offsets a hundred 500-mile round trips So the only real question is why Gore makes Paramount pay for the offsets instead of buying them himself.

THE IRRECONCILABLE CONFLICT BETWEEN CO2 PURITANS AND CO2 PRAGMATISTS

There are two aspects to the conflict: the effectiveness of carbon offsets and the moral equivalency of Puritanism and Pragmatism.

With regard to efficacy, it's not clear that the projects undertaken by groups like Climate Care and others actually prevent a ton of CO2 emissions for as little as $10. If they do, these projects are probably performed in less-developed countries that currently use energy very inefficiently, often because energy consumption is subsidized. (Subsidizes always encourage excess consumption.) But in Western nations, where energy is usually priced at market rates, few investments in CO2 reduction are likely to cost so little. And it makes sense for CO2 Pragmatists to allocate their carbon neutrality contributions to the Third World where they do good in many other ways, such as alleviating poverty by enabling poor people to spend less on energy and more on other goods and services, like better health care and housing.

CO2 Pragmatists probably should care a lot about whether these projects are as effective as advertised, and some amount of independent validation appears to be going on. Our quick review suggests that these validation efforts are not very transparent, and transparency is essential for credibility. Also, some validators are not genuinely independent; like the NGO programs they review, they are committed to environmental causes, and this commitment, however noble, is always susceptible to manipulation. It's also possible that CO2 Pragmatists are happily ignorant of these details, especially if the true cost of preventing a ton of CO2 emissions is $30, $100, or $1,000. The supply of CO2 Pragmatists is greatest the cheaper it is to be pragmatic.

With regard to moral equivalency, CO2 Puritans dismiss carbon offsets as modern-day indulgences. That's clearly the view of Newsweek's Brad Stone, who says carbon offsets are a way to "do good while doing bad." Yet for all his criticism it isn't clear (and appears highly unlikely given his job as Newsweek's science and technology reporter) that Stone himself behaves with the CO2 Puritanism he appears to demand from others.

This is an underlying theme of CO2 Puritans: saving the world requires huge, collective, and collectively-imposed sacrifice. Assuaging guilt by purchasing carbon offsets is a lot like "cheap grace." Borrowing from Christian theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner." For CO2 Puritans, that aptly describes what CO2 Pragmatists practice. Buying carbon offsets justifies the sin of CO2 emission without requiring the sinner to change his conduct. Whether carbon offsets pave a faster path toward reduced-carbon energy technologies is immaterial to CO2 Puritans because the path itself is morally flawed.

Data from the SAS emission calculator, Copenhagen to London Stansted. 70% cabin load factor assumed in all cases.:

Airbus 319
141 passengers
10,682 kg CO2
108.2 kg/passenger

Airbus 321
184 passengers
12,755 kg CO2
99 kg/passenger

Boeing MD-81/82
150 passengers
14,075 CO2
134 kg/passenger

Boeing MD-87
125 psg
12,799 kg CO2
146.3 kg/passenger

Bombardier Q-400
72 psg
6,438 kg CO2
127.7 kg/passenger

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The contest between CO2 Puritans and CO2 Pragmatists

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