Sustainable transport: a walk in the park? – Source: Wikimedia

“Would you like to live in a cleaner, safer, healthier, friendlier, more beautiful, more democratic, sustainable world in which you know your neighbours and it is safe for your children to play in the street?”

That is the question which geographer John Adams posed in 2001.  It would be difficult to find anyone who would answer in the negative.  But the situation is complicated by its flipside:

“Would you like a car, unlimited air miles and a capacity to travel anywhere you would like to?”

Until very recently, it would have been extremely tempting to answer in the affirmative.  More capacity to travel would mean that we could enjoy more holidays and see more of our family and friends in far-flung places, wouldn’t it?  More exposure to different people and cultures from around the world would also have cultural benefits: travel broadens the mind.  Foreign exchanges, spells of working abroad, and other travels have certainly widened my horizons, and future generations would surely benefit from similarly mind-opening journeys.  Most economists would add that with our ‘tourist pounds’, we are able to spread the benefits of economic growth all over the world.

A mind-opening journey to Montserrat – Source: Author

But Adams pointed out that if we live in a world in which everyone’s wish for more travel is granted, then life will become more challenging for everyone, and especially so for the poor and disenfranchised.  His especial beef was with the increasing propensity for people to travel further, faster, more frequently, and more excessively than ever before – a trend he called ‘hypermobility’.

The impacts of hypermobility

One of Adams’s concerns was the environmental cost of excessive travel.  I share those concerns, and I cycle to work and limit my flying to once every couple of years, as my contribution to allaying them.  But as an optimist, I look forward to an era with unlimited ‘green’ energy, therefore in a generation or so, his concerns about pollution should, I hope, become baseless.

However, regardless of the environmental costs of travel, Adams argued convincingly that a world in which more people can travel where they want and when they want, would be “dangerous, ugly, bleak, crime-ridden, alienated, anonymous, undemocratic [and] socially polarized”.

His overriding worry was that vast numbers of people moving around in sealed-off bubbles to ever more distant places threatens social cohesion.  Physically removing people from each other makes us feel less community-minded and therefore less likely to act in ways which contribute towards the common good.

Was Adams whistling in the wind?  Twenty years after his call to curtail ‘hypermobility’, outside of a handful of cities in affluent countries, there have been few signs of a significant shift in ‘car culture’ anywhere in the world… until recent weeks.

Window of opportunity

Perhaps a new window of opportunity has been opened which may allow us to reverse the trend of hypermobility.  People across the world have begun to get used to different ways of life in recent weeks, including working from home and limiting the journeys we make to undertake exercise.

There are more people than usual exercising in neighbourhood streets and open spaces.  This seems paradoxical – in a lockdown, surely the opposite would be true?  But without gyms to visit and with trips to beauty spots discouraged, many people are exploring the areas near to their homes.  Might we have had a taste of a more sustainable future?

Yes, our encounters with each other have been awkward – a kind of coronavirus sidestep takes place to keep two metres of distance between us.  However, the exchange of smiles, nods and friendly words has been heartening after hours cooped up indoors.  And then there’s the joy of seeing friends and neighbours out on their perambulation, as well as the intangible benefit of connecting with one’s local ‘turf’.

I see vast potential in continuing with some of these ways of life after the lockdown is loosened.  I am not alone – the AA President, Edmund King, says that the coronavirus crisis will change the way that we live, work and travel, and that some of the money earmarked for road infrastructure could instead be channelled into enhancing broadband provision to help home working.

The walkable city – Source: Academy of urbanism

And planners from Jan Gehl to Jeff Speck have lauded the concept of the ‘walkable city’.  Their research shows that small exchanges with others – whether they are strangers or friends, colleagues or shop-workers – give life a much-needed lift and an indefinable buzz to our everyday life.

Worthwhile sacrifices?

Cutting back on our excessive use of transport would sacrifice some of the benefits of frequent travel, but is this not worthwhile in order, as Adams put it, to “protect and enhance what we value in nature and our relations with friends and neighbours”?  Community cohesion would improve, our streets would be safer, and our planet would thank us.  It wouldn’t be easy, as it would come up against great opposition.  However:

“To question the benefits of hypermobility is not to deny freedom and choice. It is to ask people what it is that they really, really want, and to confront them with the fact that their choices have consequences beyond the primary objects of their desires. Collective self-discipline is the wise exercise of freedom and choice.” (Adams, 2001: 10)

Twenty years after the idea was first floated, it’s finally time to become less hyper about mobility.

References:

Adams (2001) The Social Consequences of Hypermobility – RSA lecture, 21 November 2001.  Script available at john-adams.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2006/hypermobilityforRSA.pdf

Gehl, J. (n.d.) www.gehlpeople.com

Geographical Association (n.d.) Responses to Hypermobility https://www.geography.org.uk/Responses-to-Hypermobility

Harrabin, R. (2020) Coronavirus will transform UK work and travel, says AA – BBC News website, 3 April: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-52137968

Speck, J. (n.d.) www.jeffspeck.com

I was going to get all hot and bothered and write a polemical post on ‘humanity bashing’.

I had made the assumption that Chris Packham’s documentary ‘7.7 billion and counting’, which was recently aired on the BBC was misanthropic.  I had read about its wilder claims online as well as in the printed media – such as in my father-in-law’s copy of the Radio Times (Buerk, 2020).  I feared a dredging up of 1970s-style fears such as a ‘population time bomb’ (see photo below).  My optimistic mindset was also rankled at reading statements such as Packham’s belief that Lagos is “pre-apocalypse Earth”, which was quoted in the same article.

Fig.1: Excerpt from Radio Times preview of ‘7.7 billion and counting’ (18-24 Jan 2020 issue)

I was ready to mount a defence of humanity against the onslaught of pessimism.  At the start of the show, I hovered my thumb over a blank tweet, ready to release a tide of optimism onto an unsuspecting internet… or at least onto my small band of followers.

Misanthropy and the ‘human-sceptic’ narrative

Discussions about population control in the context of sustainability should of course take place, but, in the absence of a fuller awareness of demography and global progress, they can stray into dangerous territory – a turning of humanity against itself.

A number of instances in the weeks preceding the documentary had persuaded me that misanthropy in one form or another is still alive and well.  The letters page of the Yorkshire Post, for example, hinted at harsh solutions to the supposed ‘population crisis’:

Figure 2: Yorkshire Post, 20 Jan 2020

Comments on an otherwise moderate Facebook thread about environmental action had also taken me aback:

Figure 3: Facebook thread (screenshot by author, Jan 2020)

Closer to home, whilst talking with a teaching colleague about the environment, he said “What no-one seems to talk about is the elephant in the room.”  I queried him: “Do you mean climate change?”.  “No” he said, “overpopulation”.  I didn’t want to press him as to what he felt the next logical stage would be to solve this problem; I feared his response.

Even David Attenborough, a patron of Population Matters, and someone I hugely respect, feeds into this ‘human-sceptic’ narrative: he is quoted on their website as saying:

“All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people, and harder – and ultimately impossible – to solve with ever more people.”

A commonly raised concern is that if population reaches a certain level, then ‘limits to growth’ are reached and either the environment or society – or possibly both – suffers.  This is the essence of Malthusianism.  Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that population tends to increase faster than the supply of resources needed to sustain it.  Despite being disproved in almost all scenarios – as Amartya Sen points out, most modern famines, for example, are not due to a decline in the availability of food, but rather to a restriction in food supplies – Malthusianism persists.  The misanthropy that Malthusianism fosters is dangerous for anyone who is interested in human flourishing and progress.

Population control can be used as an excuse to subjugate the world’s poor.  It can be used an excuse to reduce immigration.  It can be used as an excuse to reduce aid budgets.  It also contributes towards an anti-progress narrative: in ‘Factfulness’, Hans Rosling recounted how a student told him “They [people in developing and emerging countries] can’t live like us.  We can’t let them continue developing like this.  Their emissions will kill the planet” (2018: 214).  Rosling countered this by noting “how easily we in the West seem to shift responsibility away from ourselves and onto others.  We say that ‘they’ cannot live like us.  The right thing to say is, ‘We cannot live like us” (ibid: 215).

In the more distant past, famine has even been welcomed as an effective method for keeping numbers down: sources quote the British civil servant responsible for Ireland, Sir Charles Trevelyan, as saying that the great famine in the 1840s was an “effective mechanism for reducing surplus population”.

So as I sat down to watch the documentary, I thought I would be confronted with a barrage of pessimism; an onslaught of doom-mongering.  My thumb hovered expectantly.

Trying hard to keep an open mind

But I was determined to try to watch the programme with an open mind.

It didn’t begin well: Chris Packham drew a graph showing population rising exponentially, stopping at 2020, with the unspoken implication being that it was due to carry on rising as the same rate.  Below is a very similar graph, from the website of Population Matters, which Chris Packham is a patron of:

Figure 4: Historic population growth.  Source: Population Matters

A slightly more even-handed graph might have been one like the one below, which shows the most recent median projections from the United Nations, superimposed with a line graph showing a drastically slowing growth rate:

Figure 5: Historic population growth and median projection.  Source: Our World in Data

Packham also spoke about being “terrified” about the future of his step-child and of humanity in general, and the whole programme lacked sufficient context in terms of the great strides that have been made, especially since the 1950s, in almost all aspects of human development, ranging from healthcare to education, and living standards to human rights, which are covered in ‘Factfulness’, as well as ‘Progress’ by Johan Norberg (2017) and ‘Enlightenment Now’ by Steven Pinker (2018),  and which I have written about here and in Alcock (2019a, 2019b).

It also came as no surprise that the local environmental improvements that are sometimes seen as countries enter later stages of development (cleaner air and water, peak car use, energy efficiencies, and so on) were not mentioned.

Common ground

However, as the programme progressed, and the views of a range of demographers and other experts were aired, I began to note some areas of common ground with Packham (and indeed with Population Matters):

• We concur that humans are “adaptable and resilient” (Packham’s words), although I feel that more attention could have been paid to the lessons from history, which show us that humanity responds to the imminent reaching of apparent ‘limits to growth’ being more innovative in terms of technology (one thinks of the Simon vs Ehrlich debate, and the findings of Ester Boserup and Ruth de Fries (2014)) or governance (e.g. fishing quotas, bans and emissions trading systems).
• We recognise that fertility rates (the number of births per woman) are lower than they ever have been, and are forecast to fall further
• We both believe that fertility rates should fall if we want to have a sustainable future for the world.  However, pinning a number on the ideal ‘fertility rate’ is difficult, because if it drops too quickly then we are left with another type of demographic ‘time bomb’ – that of an ageing population with too few people to support them
• We agree that access to education, and access to contraception, are crucial elements in reducing fertility rates.  Both policies have health, human rights and well-being benefits too
• We agree that alleviating poverty is a key way of bringing fertility rates down.  Some analyses of the Chinese one-child policy show that most of the reduction in fertility rates which took place in the years of its operation would have happened anyway, as more prosperous families tend to have fewer children.  However, I would go further and promote the increase of living standards in developing and emerging countries to those experienced in the western world, in order to achieve an even more rapid fall in fertility

I am also heartened that Population Matters has dropped or modified many, if not yet all, of its most misanthropic policies.  These include campaigning to restrict the flow of refugees to the UK, and its PopOffsets scheme to ‘offset’ carbon emissions by funding family planning schemes in the developing world, which was criticised as being condescending and of enabling affluent polluters to assuage their guilt (the latter criticism can be applied to carbon offsetting, which I defend as a short-term measure here).

Incidentally, calm and rational examination of the role of demographics in shaping a sustainable future for our planet may help to assuage one of my other concerns: that too much guilt is being heaped upon members of the public to encourage them to make radical lifestyle choices.  I fear that the pressure on individuals to ‘do something’ can result in eco-anxiety, and wider issues such as demographics require more attention in both academic and popular discourse.  I would have been even happier if I had seen more emphasis on the role that governments can play in terms of nudging and legislating towards policies such as reducing meat consumption and promoting energy efficiencies and environmentally-friendly energy generation.

A truce – but what now?

Throughout the documentary, I was in communication with a Population Matters spokesperson, and by the end of it, I tweeted that I had reached somewhat of a truce with them.  We have more beliefs in common than those which divide us.  So where does that leave me now that I am a little less hot and bothered?  Here are a few points I have been chewing on in recent days:

Approaching issues with an open-mind is crucial, as is sensibly engaging with people who may have an opinion which differs from yours.

It is important to take previews with a pinch of salt: they are designed to hook media consumers into watching or listening certain content.  Previews will latch on to the most extreme parts of a message to try to attract our attention.  The media will not easily change their ways: as Hans Rosling et al put it in ‘Factfulness’, “I cannot see even the highest-quality news outlets conveying a neutral and nondramatic representative picture of the world… It would be correct but just too boring” (2018: p.253).

Critical media engagement is a crucial skill which could and should be taught.  We particularly need a way of engaging with social media consumers which will encourage people to respond more critically with output relating to the environment and human progress.  On an individual basis, this means following the ‘rules of thumb’ outlined in ‘Factfulness’ – and summarised here – but I go further than Rosling.  He says “it is up to us as consumers to learn how to consume the news more factfully” and “it is not the goal of activists or politicians to present the world as it really is” (p.253).  However, I think that it is crucial that alongside individual changes in behaviour, we should also move towards governmental, corporate and educational initiatives to ingrain media literacy and critical thinking among the widest possible section of society.  The time is right for this.  As Bobby Duffy wrote in The Perils of Perception:

“While we shouldn’t think there was ever an age of perfectly neutral information, we also shouldn’t kid ourselves: we’re travelling towards a world where disinformation has more opportunity to be created and travel faster” (2018: 237).

I am working on such a project at the moment.  This, I believe, is one of the great issues of the media-saturated and uncertain world of the 2020s.  Without such a push, I fear a proliferation of the already worrying amount of comments which tend towards the extremes – such as those noted earlier from Facebook and the Yorkshire Post – and the insidious growth of unspoken feelings which go against the greater good.

It is possible to reinvigorate enlightenment values of reason, and to aim for a more human – and humane – way of viewing the world.  Open-mindedness and critical thinking are complex but essential weapons in this mission.

Thanks for reading.

David

References (in addition to those hyperlinked in the text):

Alcock, D. (2019a) ‘An Optimistic Education: Rebalancing the curriculum to more accurately convey human progress’. Impact: Journal of Chartered College of Teaching, Issue 6: https://impact.chartered.college/article/an-optimistic-education-rebalancing-curriculum-accurately-convey-human-progress/

Alcock, D. (2019b) ‘Optimism, Progress and Geography – Celebration and calibration’. Teaching Geography, 44(3), 118-120.

Buerk, M. (2020) ‘I’m not a baby person’, Radio Times, 24-30 January 2020 issue, pp10-13

DeFries, R. (2014) The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Environmental Crisis.

Duffy, B. (2018) The Perils of Perception: Why We’re Wrong about Nearly Everything. London: Atlantic.

Norberg, J. (2017) Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future London: OneWorld

Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress London: Penguin

Rosling, H., Rosling, O. and Rosling Rönnlund, A. (2018) Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things are Better than you Think. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Joseph Wright: A Philosopher Lecturing with a Mechanical Planetary, 1766 (Source) 

• What is progress?
• How can it be measured?
• What are the prospects for future progress?
• How can social and economic progress occur with minimal impact on the environment?
• Why is is that progress made by humankind since 1800, and especially since 1950, has been unappreciated by so many people?

Many of these questions have been with us for centuries.  But three trends in the last five years or so have moved them towards the centre stage among academics, social commentators and politicians:

1. A questioning of social democratic norms and a retreat from some aspects of globalisation, as exemplified by the Brexit vote, the continued popularity of Donald Trump, and a shift towards populism in many parts of the world
2. An increase in concerns about environmental sustainability, particularly regarding climate change and plastic pollution
3. An increasing number of commentators are becoming more vocal in championing a more rational, humanist, and positive view of the world.  These people – who range from academics to public health professionals and data scientists to journalists – have been given the contentious collective term ‘new optimists‘*

Is the time right for ‘Progress Studies’?

Partly as a response to these trends in the zeitgeist, Patrick Collison (an ‘entrepreneur’) and Tyler Cowen (an economics professor) are promoting the establishment of a new field of study called ‘Progress Studies’:

“Progress … is understudied. By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up.” (Collinson and Cowen, 2019)

Collinson and Cowen appreciate the challenges facing this nascent discipline: they admit the costly and time-consuming process of reorganising departments, timetables, staffing and degree programmes (not to mention, I would add, complications in secondary education and the transition to higher education).

Undaunted, they propose a ‘school of thought’, akin to climate science, which would arise from a ‘decentralised shift’ of some of the time and priorities of academics.  In time, communities, journals, and conferences would be devoted to these questions.

Fragmented scholarship?

They appreciate that “[p]lenty of existing scholarship touches on these topics, but it takes place in a highly fragmented fashion”, and they point to several subjects which can claim to have contributed to studies about progress.  They focus on economics, business studies, psychology and history (specifically ‘applied history’).

I would add philosophy to this list – for what would Progress Studies be without a robust philosophical base?  It could consider, for example, what the telos (final goal) of progress should be, and it could consider the notion that citizens might only sign up to progress if it is imbued with meaning for them (see, for example, Laïdi, 1998).

Politics is also absent from Collinson and Cowen’s list – but the chances of continued progress (of any conception) would be stymied without political backing, or at least aquiescence.  Sociology can stake a claim too: Diane Coyle (2019) points to a Twitter exchange in which Professor Gina Neff argues that “the rise of the industrial revolution gave rise to the entire disicpline of sociology to empirically measure the changes happening to people & society as the the economy changed. It was ‘Progress Studies 1.0’, if you will.” (Neff, 2019).

We already have a ‘Progress Studies’ – Geography

However, the authors’ most egregious omission is Geography.  I argue that Geography is the most well-equipped to deal with the complexities and spatial variances of progress.  Aside from my own bias as a geographer, why do I hold this point of view?

– Many of the questions posed by Collison and Cowen are spatial, and therefore inherently geographical: one such question they pose is “Looking backwards, it’s striking how unevenly distributed progress has been in the past. … Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why was early-20th-century science in Germany and Central Europe so strong?”

– There is a well-established discipline of Development Studies, which is linked to Geography and has manifested itself as an undergraduate degree course as well as in Development Education Centres.  The existence of Development Studies as an IGCSE subject (it is to be withdrawn in 2021) and a World Development A Level (2009-2018) shows that it has had a foothold in formal secondary qualifications too.

– Geography has a long history of questioning very the notion of, let alone the definitions of, progress.  Diane Coyle (2019), an economist, states that “the standard indicator of real GDP growth, which leaves out much of what people value, will no longer do….How should it be measured and monitored, and who experiences it?”.  This is commonly understood by school age geographers; Economics has no monopoly on such questioning.

– The discipline is powerful – it can pose ‘Big Geographical Questions‘ which recognise complexity; it has also thrived on the challenge of tackling ‘wicked problems‘ and can interrogate and respond to them.

– Geography is proving its worth in a world which is crying out for knowledge and understanding over ignorance.  To hand the reins of ‘Progress Studies’ over to members of other disciplines might be unwise, as they may understand some concepts in depth, but their worldview is incomplete.  One example of this is Coyle (2019): this article implies a level of ignorance about the extent of progress across the world which some of the ‘new optimists’ would find ironic: she states that “if most people do not experience progress, then society isn’t really progressing at all” – when in fact, most of the people in the world are experiencing progress (see, for example, Norberg, 2017, Roslings et al, 2018, Pinker, 2018).  I contend that a more valid concern is that large numbers of global citizens do not appreciate this progress, not through willfulness or a lack of intelligence, but thanks to a complex interplay of psychological heuristics, media biases, and educational inertia.

Stand up and be counted!

Practitioners of geography are still wrestling with conceptions of progress – and will do indefinitely.  I have argued elsewhere that one of the challenges facing current geographical education is that it seems to be skewed towards negativity and is one of the midwives of the ‘age of anxiety’ (Alcock, 2019a, 2019b, Standish and Alcock, 2019).  Nevertheless, if Progress Studies is to develop as a discipline, Geography should stand up and be counted as the strongest candidate for ‘owning’ it – and for responding to the debate which has surrounded its proposal.

[I welcome responses, enlightenment and challenges to these thoughts!]

References:

Alcock, D. (2019a) ‘An Optimistic Education: Rebalancing the curriculum to more accurately convey human progress’. Impact: Journal of Chartered College of Teaching, Issue 6: https://impact.chartered.college/article/an-optimistic-education-rebalancing-curriculum-accurately-convey-human-progress/

Alcock, D. (2019b) ‘Optimism, Progress and Geography – Celebration and Calibration’. Teaching Geography, 44(3), 118-120.

Collinson, P. and Cowen, T. (2019) ‘We Need a New Science of Progress’ in The Atlantic, 30 July: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/

Coyle, D. (2019) ‘The Puzzle of Economic Progress’ in Project Syndicate, 13 August: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-progress-academic-research-puzzle-by-diane-coyle-2019-08

Laïdi, Z (1998) A World Without Meaning (Routledge)

Neff, G. (2019) Tweet,7:15 AM · Jul 31, 2019: https://twitter.com/ginasue/status/1156448180642488321

Norberg, J. (2017) Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future (OneWorld)

Pinker, S. (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. UK: Penguin Random House.

Rosling, H., Rosling, O. and Rosling Rönnlund, A. (2018) Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World – and Why Things are Better than you Think. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Standish, A. and Alcock, D. (2019) ‘Social Progress, Optimism and the Curriculum: Where is the Intergenerational Conversation Going Wrong?’ – paper submitted to Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, 6 December

* Note on The ‘New Optimists’: Building on the ideas of Ester Boserup, Julian Simon and Bjorn Lomborg, their number includes Steven Pinker, Max Roser, Matt Ridley, Johan Norberg, and Hans, Ola and Anna Rosling.  Whilst they are by no means a coherent entity, and they span the political spectrum, what these so-called ‘new optimists’ share is a desire for a more optimistic – or at least, in the words of Rosling et al (2018), a ‘possibilistic’, view of the world.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex

Source: https://thekit.ca/life/celebrity-life/elton-john-meghan-markle-prince-harry/

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been given a rough ride in some sections of the media.  A short time after speaking out in favour of action to tackle climate change, they were criticised as hypocrites for taking four plane journeys in eleven days.  This is a familiar criticism levelled at celebrities and politicians who do the same thing.

One defence of this criticism is that to make the most of their influential positions, such people need to be seen and heard in as many places as possible.  It could also be argued that they are operating within a transport system which provides no reasonable alternatives for time-pressed travellers who wish to reach long-haul locations.  In my opinion, these are only partially acceptable excuses: accusations that frequent-flying eco-celebrities are being hypocrites still, at first glance, have a degree of validity.

Damned if they do and damned if they don’t

But what if their flights have been carbon offset?  Carbon offsetting involves paying an organisation to invest in climate protection projects throughout the world which reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, thus protecting the climate.

In the case of Harry and Meghan, Elton John was publicised as having contributed, on their behalf, to a carbon offset scheme run by Carbon Footprint.  Despite criticism of Al Gore flying around the world to push for climate action (as shown in his film An Inconvenient Truth), he too has carbon offset his emissions.  Leonardo di Caprio is another high-profile carbon offsetter, as is Greta Thunberg, who has ensured that the flights her crew took back to Europe following her ‘zero-carbon’ sailing trip to America have been carbon balanced.

I tend to support carbon offsetting.  I recognise that this opinion may partly stem from my self-interest of wanting to take a flight every year or two, but  I believe it has a role to play as a pragmatic, short-term response to climate change.  Let us examine the key criticisms made of the approach.

Criticism 1. They are not taking CO₂ out of the air

Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist at Greenpeace [disclaimer: I am a member], was quoted in the Daily Mail as saying: “These are good schemes, and they have positive outcomes, but they are things we should be doing anyway.  But they’re not taking out CO₂.”  It’s true in many cases: some schemes are not taking out CO₂, they are merely preventing CO₂ entering the atmosphere.  For instance, one project involves replacing fuel-inefficient stoves with more efficient ones in some of the poorest regions of the world, such as Darfur (Sudan) and rural Kenya.  Nevertheless, I would argue that preventing CO₂ from entering the atmosphere is itself a laudable goal, and one which may not take place to such a great an extent if it wasn’t for carbon offsetting schemes.

Fig 1: A Carbon Footprint tree-planting scheme

https://www.carbonfootprint.com/plantingtrees.html

However reafforestation schemes do take CO₂ out of the air, once the trees have been established.  And I imagine that in the near future, schemes could involve investing in carbon capture and storage solutions too – such as the ones I write about here.

Criticism 2: The impacts of carbon offsetting will take a long time to have an impact

In the case of the Sussexes, the Daily Mail reported that it would take 320 years for a single tree to absorb all of the CO₂ emitted by the four flights they took in August 2019, as shown by Figure 2 below.  On one level, this graphic is ridiculous, as they wouldn’t have paid for just one tree to be planted!  But a more sensible argument is that even if many hundreds of trees were planted to absorb the CO₂, they would take a few years to grow to their full effectiveness.

Figure 2: Misleading Daily Mail graphic showing the ‘slow’ effects of carbon offsetting

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7372959/Carbon-setting-scheme-supported-Sir-Elton-John-no-meaningful-effect-climate.html

As well as the slightly flippant, but nevertheless partially valid, response of ‘better late than never’, another riposte is that whilst it may well be a long time until the CO₂ you emit gets soaked up by the trees that are planted, most carbon offset schemes give more immediate results because, for example, their funds go towards renewable energy schemes or  energy efficiency measures.

Additionally, some schemes allow institutions to have the trees planted on or near their grounds (see Figure 1), therefore helping members of such institutions – including schoolchildren – a chance to physically connect with the natural environment, to associate climate change with nature, and to encourage a sense of ‘biophilia‘ which may encourage them to develop other pro-environment behaviours.

Criticism 3: The rich will be able to buy their way out of environmental responsibility

George Monbiot has compared carbon offsetting to the medieval Catholic church’s sale of ‘indulgences’ whereby wealthy parishioners could have their sins absolved for a price – and thus be free to sin again:

“Just as in the 15th and 16th centuries you could sleep with your sister and kill and lie without fear of eternal damnation, today you can live exactly as you please as long as you give your ducats to one of the companies selling indulgences. It is pernicious and destructive nonsense.”

But, if carbon offsetting were carried out routinely, and even became a legal obligation – perhaps by means of some kind of ‘overdraft fee’ for a personal ‘carbon budget’ – then I propose that they should be treated as a valid and in fact commendable extension of the notion of ‘the polluter pays’ principle.

Monbiot also stated that “Even if, through carbon offset schemes carried out in developing countries, every poor nation on the planet became carbon-free, we would still have to cut most of the carbon we produce at home [to restrict global warming to 2 degrees warmer than pre-industrial levels].”  This statement both ignores the possibility of carbon offsetting schemes being carried out in developed countries, and understates the abilities of developing countries to undertake a transition to a low carbon economy.

It is easy to underestimate the potential of carbon offsetting.  Yes, merely offsetting the carbon emissions of our activities may be insufficient to avoid runaway climate change, but if we were to double or triple our offsetting payments, then we could really make a difference in this regard.  Countries have indeed begun to consider introducing offsetting escalators: in the UK, the government’s climate advisers, the Committee on Climate Change, has recommended that a frequent flyer levy, under which each citizen would be allowed one tax-free flight a year, but would pay progressively higher taxes on each additional flight.

Criticism 4: The projects might have happened anyway

The ‘environmental Kuznets curve‘ theory (see Figure 3) states that countries develop, they go through three stages in relation to environmental degradation:

• Pre-industrial Economies: The environment becomes gradually more degraded as agriculture mechanises and energy-intensive industries grow
• Industrial Economies: The dominant economic sector is manufacturing, and energy sources tend to be high carbon
• Post-Industrial Economies: Pollution decreases as manufacturing activities either become more energy efficient or close down [pollution can be ‘exported’ abroad in some cases], environmental awareness rises, and increased levels of affluence enables countries to enact and support environmental laws

Figure 3: The environmental Kuznets curve

Source: Kjeffreytaylor [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D

On this basis, it could be claimed that typical carbon offsetting projects such as afforestation and promoting renewable energy will happen anyway, and so carbon offsetting is a pointless diversion of funds away from other ways of protecting the environment.

But even if carbon offsetting projects would eventually happen according to this theory, I can see no harm in accelerating their implementation, as they will set the standard for others to follow.  And Monbiot’s criticism that some schemes may fail, and that many are unaccountable is now outdated, as there are now Quality Assurance Schemes and auditing of market leading companies such as Carbon Footprint.

Carbon offsetting – a short-term, pragmatic approach

Of course carbon offsetting is not a panacea.  Climate change is a pressing and long-term global problem, and carbon offsetting can only be a short- to medium-term response to it.

More efforts should be focused on shifting political, corporate, and human mindsets, and, in more practical terms, we need to develop renewable energy sources and increase energy efficiency.  But one irony is that such efforts could be funded by carbon offsetting, and by marshalling the troops against it, some commentators are reducing the chances that it can be solved, both by reducing the cash flow from such sources, and by fostering cynicism in pro-environment activity (as shown by the Daily Mail article).

Perhaps more disturbing, however, is the moral framing of the issue.  The ‘polluter pays’ principle is lauded by environmentalist commentators when applied to big businesses and countries.  But when it comes to individuals, moral arguments against it are marshalled – here is Monbiot again: “[Y]ou can now buy complacency, political apathy and self-satisfaction. But you cannot buy the survival of the planet.”

I contend that, although it is not the only way forward, you can to some extent buy the survival of the planet.  You may need to be impelled to do so and to overpay for it to have a significant effect, but you can buy it.  And if you do, then you should not feel guilty.

Moral absolutism will not win any friends in this most emotional of environmental topics; global citizens, corporations and governments should aspire to reduce their carbon footprint, and if carbon offsetting forms part of these efforts, then it should be welcomed as a short-term, pragmatic part of the mix.