Carbon Neutral?

There has been much talk of going carbon neutral of late. And as a result many large corporates now claim to carbon neutral. But are they? It's all down to 'off-setting' - which in very simple terms allows an energy efficient company, that is below it's CO2 limit, to sell the excess CO2's to a company that is not so efficient, and either over it's limit, or perhaps more likely, keen to show the world it is actually environmentally sound. Add in extra factors such as being able to gain extra CO2's in exchange for investing in a windmill or buying a few trees.

In principal, anything that encourages a bit of corporate responsibility is of course a good thing, but the trouble is taken to an extreme the system means that a coal-fired power station could declare itself carbon neutral - although in commercial terms this would I suspect be economically unviable, after all the publics gullibility only goes so far....

In truth, the system just moves emissions around - those who want the PR of being green can get it with no real effort, and those who don't care can sell off their excess CO2's each year to help the aforementioned PR conscious companies.

This all became apparent because I wondered if it was right for us go carbon neutral. Now I know we don't actually have to cut emissions to be so, it seems pretty pointless. But how close are we? Well, if we used a horse for deliveries, and a windmill for electricity, then we'd be there without any trickery & form filling. But 'green' energy is bally expensive so it seems, and given the squeeze on beer margins it is unviable at the moment (but we keep going back to it, and it's getting cheaper!). As for the horse? Well, a great idea, but can you imagine paperwork, rules, regulations, complaints about animal abuse, etc etc etc. So for now we'll stick to what we are doing - although bio-diesel is an option, but only if it is not grown at the expense of an African's next dinner. Which of course means that unless we complete the equivalent 3 acres of rainforest in forms and paperwork to let us offset, then we'll not be neutral just yet. Unlike one other well-known brewer who has launched what they claim is the worlds first carbon-neutral beer.

Well I don't know about you, but I suspect that there may, at some point in history, have been a brewery that didn't use electricity or fossil fuels in way. Surely they would have been carbon neutral? And without any offsetting either... Hmmmm.