Earth Equity News

How Carbon Offsets are Making Things Worse in Vernon, California. By Daphne Wysham, Mother Jones, July/August 2008. "You don't have to leave the U.S. for an object lesson in how an emissions offset system can go wrong. Consider Vernon, California: The tiny city and its neighboring communities have some of the highest air pollution levels in the Los Angeles basin -- and it could get worse because of one of the world's first offset initiatives. In the early '90s, Southern California implemented a federally mandated offset program for... particulate matter. .As demand for [the] offsets increased, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, which oversees the program, found [in a tempting situation]: Instead of holding on to its small quota of offsets set aside for essential services... it could sell them for a healthy profit. With particulate-matter offsets going for $200,000 a pound, the air district stands to rake in about $420 million. Polluters who buy the offsets can save millions over what they would have paid for them on the open market. [In other words,] even though Southern California's air pollution levels have been capped, offsets could have a paradoxical effect on the 100 or so residents of Vernon and the mostly Hispanic and low-income residents of surrounding areas. Vernon, whose motto is "Exclusively Industrial," was already a pollution magnet; its city council welcomed just about any facility that wanted to locate there, including a hazardous-waste dump and a metal-processing plant. There are now plans to use pollution offsets to build a 934-megawatt natural-gas-fired power plant there. That's perfectly acceptable within the rules of the offset program, but it means a greater concentration of toxic air pollutants in an already hard-hit area. 'It's as if the local permitting authorities are saying, We already have a national sacrifice area in Vernon; a little more wouldn't make any difference,' says Pat Costner, science adviser to the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. Or as Angela Johnson Meszaros [of] the California Environmental Rights Alliance, concludes, 'Access to pollution credits means pollution in our communities, period.'" Daphne Wysham is a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and cohost of Earthbeat Radio.