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The British government is taking an interest in the Carbon Offset game. The House of Commons environmental audit committee is to launch an inquiry next month. Tim Yeo, Conservative chairman of the all-party committee, explains: "The difficulty about this is it is completely unregulated and therefore there may be some dubious practices we don't know of... The second problem is establishing that what you are doing wouldn't have happened anyway." The inquiry will consider whether there should be a compulsory accreditation scheme for carbon offset projects, and whether there is enough good information around to enable consumers to choose. Mmm, tricky: who do you think they’re going to ask?

Meanwhile, The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA, not always known for taking an angle that bears any relationship to the rest of government or EU policy, has named four offsets companies that meet its own new criteria to bring "greater clarity" to the industry – Pure, Global Cool, Equiclimate and Carbon Offsets.

Trouble is, these are companies dealing in industrial-type Certified Emission Reductions (CERs), not the Verified Emission Reductions (VERs) that we’re used to, clean energy projects in developing countries, etc. "CERs are designed to be used by countries to meet their Kyoto reduction targets. So in leveraging business to offer CERs to the public, the worst case scenario is that this is just a back door way of Government being able to get more money out of the consumer purse – for a job they should be doing themselves.” So says Lawrence Hunt, CEO of Silverjet, a new business-class airline which claims to be the world's first to go completely carbon neutral by including a mandatory offset contribution in its ticket prices (a scheme developed with the CarbonNeutral Company, see article in the next Bello Mundo). While this is not in fact the case - Nature Air, one of Costa Rica's domestic airlines, has been operating a zero emissions flying programme since January 2006 – Hunt is to be congratulated for calling on all airlines to be carbon neutral. "If the industry was to simply charge its customers 90p for each hour they fly on average, then they could neutralise the carbon pollution created by the aviation industry," he said. Nice idea, shame it’s not true; but do carry on, we need the issue to stay in the news. Ah, that reminds me, CERs are twice as expensive as VERs, that must count in their favour, surely...

Conflicting advice from the government? Whatever next? You might find friendlier information about the offsets market at www.cdmgoldstandard.org, or even, maybe, at www.ticos.co.uk, (Tourism Industry Carbon Offset Scheme), the travel industry's own source. You’ll get an even better perspective if you take the time to look at www.carbontradewatch.org and www.sinkswatch.org .

I hadn’t heard it before, but I now gather that the much trumpeted (now, if only...) Coldplay carbon neutral album was clobbered when most of the trees died on the mango plantation in India they sponsored. Note also (carbontradewatch and sinkswatch, above, are good on this stuff) reports from groups like the World Rainforest Movement, pointing to alleged human rights abuses - eg. at an offset project in Mount Elgon, east Uganda, where villagers were apparently kicked off land so trees could be planted. Meanwhile back at the Ranch with the BeeGees, Tony Blair is now making some distance from his previously expressed opinion that it would be too difficult to discourage people from flying to stay at their millionaire popstar 'friends' places in Miami. Tony's official spokesman has now announced that the prime minister has asked for officials to find ways to make his holiday flights carbon neutral, beginning with that winter getaway.

One more warning note on the horizon came recently in a report from Labour-backing think-tank The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). According to their calculations, the aviation sector could make a profit of up to 4bn Euros if carbon credits are given out free and generous emission allowances allocated, as was the case when power companies agreed to be included in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (the latter made a £1bn windfall). Aviation is likely to pass on the full costs of these credits, of course, so any emissions credits given away would just be massive profit for the airlines – somewhere between € 1.34 billion and €4 billion (£0.9 billion - £2.7 billion), depending on the price level of carbon credits themselves. "The EU should take a strong lead on curbing emissions from airline flights and clip the aviation industry's wings." said Simon Retallack of the IPPR. Remember that.

Oh, the dog? No, nothing to do with trees, just the punchline of the best description of Carbon Offset I’ve come across (sorry if you’ve heard it before): “it’s like paying the RSPCA so you can go on kicking your dog.”