And now for something new. Over the past couple of years I’ve received many requests from researchers and analysts wanting access to the raw data in Carbon Catalog. In response, to mark the new year, Carbon Catalog is now offering free download access to its data for any internal or non-commercial purposes. If this interests you, just head over to the Download Data page, ensure you understand the terms and conditions, and grab what you need.

I look forward to hearing how else we can be helpful. In the meantime, a very happy 2010.

Over the next couple of months, a new version of Carbon Catalog will be released, which significantly expands the remit of the site. Carbon Catalog is to become a general directory for carbon credits of all varieties, not just “carbon offsets” sold directly to consumers or small businesses.

To facilitate this change, Carbon Catalog will be allowing providers to enter their information directly after registering for the site. Providers will also be invited to describe their projects in detail via the online interface, and enter information on vintages, standards and per-project pricing.

This service will be entirely free for carbon providers, whether they are selling to corporations, industrial plants or consumers. Our goal is to make Carbon Catalog as extensive and informative as possible. Project listings can include VERs, CERs and credits within any new trading scheme that might arise in future.

This transition will be accompanied by a de-emphasis on Carbon Catalog’s ratings system. While the site was focused on consumer offsets, these ratings were vital in helping consumers evaluate their options. Now that we’re broadening to the wider carbon market, where buyers tend to be more savvy, the ratings have a lot less value. (Ratings might also tempt providers who are managing their own profiles to enter biased information.)

If you are a provider already listed in Carbon Catalog, an account will be created for you automatically, and we’ll contact you shortly with the details so that you can take control of your listings. If you are provider who is not yet listed, drop us a line and we’ll be sure to inform you when the new site is released.

It’s two years since the first version of Carbon Catalog was released, and I’ve been blown away by how much cooperation and interest the site has received. I look forward to this transition carrying Carbon Catalog well into the future, and making it an even more valuable resource for the carbon trading community.

The document, subtitled Fortifying the Foundation, is based on the reported activity during 2008 of 182 developers, aggregators, brokers and retailers of voluntary carbon credits.

It’s easy to be encouraged by the first paragraph in the executive summary. Global transaction volume jumped from 66m tonnes of CO2e in 2007 to 123.4m tonnes in 2008. But dig a little deeper, and the picture isn’t so rosy.

As we noted last year, carbon credits can be traded multiple times without having any impact on the environment. From the Earth’s perspective, retirement is the crucial event in the life of a carbon credit. A credit is retired when the buyer chooses not to sell it on again, thus offsetting their own emissions.

According to the report, only 12.4 million tons of CO2e could be confirmed as retired during 2008. This is almost identical to the figure from 2007. In other words, while lots more carbon changed hands, the actual amount being offset did not seem to grow at all. Perhaps an echo of the financial bubble?

Other conclusions which stand out:

• On average, credits cost $5.10/tonne at the project level, but $8.90/tonne at retail. This means that just over half (57%) of the money collected by carbon offset retailers is going directly towards carbon reduction. This is a significant improvement from last year’s figure of 44%.

• The popularity of different project types is changing, with a huge shift towards renewable energy projects such as hydropower and wind, as well as projects which prevent methane emissions from landfills.

• Almost all credits transacted are now verified according to a third party standard. This increases buyer confidence in the validity of the carbon reductions that the credits represent. Of the many standards now emerging, the Voluntary Carbon Standard is by far the most popular.

• As buyers of carbon offsets, individuals and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have all but disappeared into irrelevance. Taken together, they were responsible for just 3% of transaction volume in 2008, compared to 66% for private companies.

• As can be expected in light of the financial crisis, 2009 looks to be a year of stagnation in the voluntary carbon markets, with transactions in the first quarter down significantly.

For more facts and figures, we highly recommend downloading the full report (1Mb PDF). Many thanks to the authors (Katherine Hamilton, Milo Sjardin, Allison Shapiro and Thomas Marcello) for their hard work.

Until a few years ago, when people starting buying carbon offsets and trimming their carbon emissions, CSR might have meant donating corporate money and time to a local kids’ soccer team, or giving money to the poor. Now with more complicated issues at stake, like climate change, CSR is not just an opportunity to market your company, it is in some cases an imperative in order to stay relevant.

Of course your business might be suffering from the economic downturn, but how to come out shining, despite the crisis, is something top CEOs from around the world will be speaking about at the annual event. Mitigating corporate risks and taking charge of your responsibility in fighting climate change, will be an important part of the conference. Among the expert speakers will be Anders Dahlvig, the CEO of IKEA, Jeff Swartz, the CEO of Timberland, and Daniel Franklin, the CEO of the Economist.

Attendees will be able to learn how to seamlessly embed CSR activities into their business plan, while learning how to mitigate climate risk with less money and resources. Speakers, like the ones we’ve mentioned above, will be giving corporate players opportunities one should be focusing on today. Additionally, some cost-cutting and environmentally sound business tips will be part of the day as business leaders speak about how to run operations on a tighter budget without compromising the company’s ethics and values.

That’s right, folks! The recent economic collapse in the US, which is sending shock waves around the world, doesn’t mean you have to toss your company’s carbon offsetting ideas out the window.

For more about the conference, see the website of Ethical Corporation.

If you’d like a little more to chew on, and to start investigating carbon offsets to buy, or how they work, visit Carbon Catalog’s directory. European-based readers might find our European carbon offset providers, a good place to start.

And of course, there’s our very handy book review on 5 Books For Greening Your Business.

Etihad Airways from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced that it is working with Masdar - the same body developing the world’s first carbon neutral city - to measure, manage and reduce the carbon footprint of the international carrier. It will focus on sustainable and energy-efficient measures, reports the company.

According to a company-issued press release Masdar will help Etihad develop carbon management solutions so the company complies with the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, coming into effect for aviation in 2012, and Masdar will also support the airline’s voluntary carbon reduction initiatives.

Improving waste management plans and advising Etihad on energy saving initiatives, are also part of the (flight) plan.

This good news announcement dovetails another Middle East initiative: Qatar Airways, based in Doha, will now be encouraging customers to purchase carbon offsets for every flight. Also advertised in a press release, the company signed a “ground-breaking agreement with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) to spearhead the global carbon offset trading scheme designed to help fund global environmental projects,” reports The Peninsula.

After booking a ticket, the company –– which has already calculated the carbon footprint of your flight –– will ask you to offset it. The money paid to do so, says Sheikh Akbar Al Baker, the company’s CEO, will go towards various offsetting projects. With no details mentioned, the projects will include those supporting “alternative energy, reducing noise, recycling of waste products, and other environmentally friendly endeavors that will reduce the dangers of global warming.”

The airline also says it will also invest in cleaner and more efficient aircraft to keep carbon emissions at bay.

I laud the companies for taking stock of greenhouse gases, making it easier for them to comply with standards, no doubt essential to meet in the future at European and North American airports. It would be more noble, however, for these airlines (or any airline) to shoulder the cost of carbon offsetting themselves, or at the very least give customers a choice as to what projects they’d like to support.

Most of us can already choose to offset by our ourselves, using Carbon Catalog’s handy guide to help us pick the best projects. If so, why would I support offset projects or carbon offset providers that I know very little about, or which are serving a company’s own interest?

I guess we will have to wait for more results to assess the impact and value of these two initiatives. In the meantime, you can read about the carbon offset kiosk pilot project at the San Francisco airport.

Concerned about global warming and the quality of the offsets? Browse through our hand-picked list of carbon offset projects, each given a rating for their value.

::Green Prophet

A quality mark, shown alongside, can be used by offset providers to label specific carbon offsets that meet the government’s guidelines. (Our inclusion of the mark here is for informative purposes, and bears no relation to the offsets listed in Carbon Catalog.)

So what does the mark actually mean? We read the lengthy “Requirements and Procedures Document” (PDF) and can summarize the most important points for regular offset buyers:

• For now, only offsets certified under the UN’s Kyoto Protocol or the EU’s Emission Trading Scheme qualify. So in terms of project quality (additionality, leakage, measurement and so on), the mark piggybacks on existing guidelines and processes.

• The provider must settle any purchased offsets within a year, by cancelling carbon credits from the appropriate UN or EU scheme. In other words, providers can’t sit on your cash indefinitely, before finally getting round to buying the carbon credits you’ve paid them for.

• The calculation of CO2e volume emitted by certain activities (e.g. flying or driving) must use fixed conversion factors. This addresses a common source of confusion for offset buyers - different providers showing a different quantity of CO2e for the same flights or trips.

Providers pay a hefty fee, starting at £3,600, to apply for the scheme. They are approved (or not) by AEA Group, an environmental consultancy. All round, the UK looks to be using existing standards and players, rather than creating a large approval body of its own.

As of today, 4 UK providers (along with British Airways) have been accepted, meaning at least some of the offsets they’re selling are qualified. These are: Clear, Carbon Footprint, Carbon Passport and PURE. All 4 are already in our list of UK providers, mostly with excellent ratings. Visit the scheme’s website for an up-to-date list.

Since the quality assurance scheme is UK-specific, we’re not yet creating a separate category here at Carbon Catalog. But we do applaud the measure, and believe it will help UK offsetters feel confident about what they’re buying. With a bit of luck, US and other governments will shortly follow suit.

It is the first airport to offer such kiosks in the world. The only thing we don’t like about the service is the 30% transaction fee.

Working like the check-in kiosks at airports, a flyer would punch in their destination, and the computer would calculate how much it would cost to offset the journey. Paying with a credit card, offsetting a two hour flight inside the US is expected to cost about $4 and a flight from San Francisco to Europe about $36, making the offset process easy and straightforward. And not altogether that costly, compared to the cost of the flight.

After offsetting, the “green” traveler will also get a confirmation receipt about the amount of carbon offset and a list of carbon offset projects benefiting the donation, not yet eligible for tax purposes.

The new project is backed by San Francisco’s super-green and savvy Mayor Gavin Newsom who is putting $163,000 into the pilot project, and 3Degrees, a San Francisco based renewable energy and carbon reduction investments firm.

A portion of the offset sale will go back to the San Francisco Carbon Fund. The Fund supports local carbon offsetting projects such as solar panel installations for low-income housing and efforts to convert waste oils into biodiesel fuels.

According to Environmental Leader, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey will also start selling carbon offsets in early 2009.
This news comes in the wake of Denver International Airport’s June 2008 announcement to can its plan to implement a carbon offset program. Vendors, they say, weren’t interested.

Mike McCarron, a spokesperson for the San Francisco airport said the offset projects are to be chosen by Mayor Newsom’s office, along with 3Degrees. Those chosen will come from the list certified by the City’s Environment Department and could include renewable energy ventures in developing countries, agriculture and organic waste capture, coal mine methane capture, and sustainable forestry.

“We’d like people to stop and consider the impacts of flying,” said Steve McDougal, executive VP for 3Degrees.  “Obviously, people need to fly sometimes. No one expects them to stop, but they should consider taking steps to reduce their impacts.”

3Degrees’ kiosks will be placed in Terminal 3 at the airport and in two of its international wings. Thirty percent of each transaction, a seemingly high amount, will go to 3Degrees, with the rest going towards the projects themselves. It will happen over the course of a one-year trial period.

San Francisco, we already know, has set the bar high in environmental affairs. They were the first American city to say yes to Better Place’s electric car scheme, they are vested in clean technology investment and implementation, and have a number of offset projects in place (which we’ve already blogged about here on Carbon Catalog).

Sounds like San Francisco is the ultimate stop for urban eco-tourism. After enjoying the city, you can transport new ideas to a country and airport near you, starting with your first flight out of there. This is all thanks to the new carbon offsetting kiosks coming to you, this spring.

If people don’t buy from the kiosks, which very well may happen, at the very least it will be an interesting and important educational project.

Read more on carbon offsetting and San Francisco:
It Takes A City: Will San Francisco Be the First To Go Carbon Neutral?
A Feeble Pitch, So Why Exactly Are Consumer Offsets Failing?
Nobody’s Buying It: Rethinking Consumer Carbon Offsets

::San Francisco Chronicle

You might see their little purple delivery truck zooming around a street near you –– if you live in the Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles or Vancouver areas. Painted with the word spud! (for Small Potatoes Urban Delivery), the little green grocer on wheels is setting a fine example for small business owners everywhere.

By taking orders for local and organic foods online, not only does spud! help save the environment by reducing transport emissions, it also has a number of philanthropy activities and programs that give back to the earth.

One of spud!’s goals is to be a carbon neutral company by the end of this year. Carbon Catalog speaks with Normal Hill, the procedures coordinator
 of spud! on the nuts and bolts of going carbon neutral.

Some advice your business can glean from our interview: you can pass the cost of offsetting onto consumers –– in spud!’s case that’s 22 cents a delivery; watch out for fluctuating currency exchange rates; and –– says Hill –– one of the biggest challenges any business can face, may be changing the habits of your employees.

Did you feel pressure from your customers to become carbon neutral? No, we made the decision proactively, because we want to become an even more sustainable business, and because we believe that all businesses must do as much as possible to address the climate change crisis.

Did management drive, and were they supportive, of this initiative? Our CEO David Van Seters spearheaded our involvement in the initial workshops in which we learned how to become carbon neutral, and senior management has strongly supported the development and implementation of our Carbon Neutral Program.

How did you go about assessing your company’s carbon footprint? We learned how to measure our carbon footprint through our participation in the Climate Smart workgroup, which is run by Ecotrust Canada and the Pembina Institute. The process of assessing our footprint was not complicated, but it was time consuming. The hard part was digging up all our records on energy usage and the other things we included in the measurements. After that it was easy: we simply input the numbers into Climate Smart’s easy-to-use greenhouse gas calculator. The calculator tallied up the results and gave us a detailed analysis of our carbon footprint.

Did you use the services of external environmental consultants? If so, who did you use and how did you choose them? As part of our participation in the Climate Smart workgroup, we received complementary technical support to help us with any questions, including how to use the greenhouse gas calculator. Staff were incredibly helpful.

What type of activity did you include? Are there any (e.g. employees’ journey to work) which you debated about? We included delivery of all orders to our customers, all energy use of our warehouses and offices, staff business travel (excluding regular commuting), and office paper use. We even included – as best we could estimate – the transportation of goods from their last point of value added to our warehouses.

We debated about the inclusion of transportation of goods to spud!, but in the end we decided that, although this was largely beyond our direct control, we should include it since it is such a significant amount of emissions. We decided against including regular staff commuting since collecting the data would probably be more cumbersome than it would be worth, as many of our staff walk, bike, or take public transit to work.

Nevertheless, we do encourage staff to use public transit through our participation in a public transit subsidy program.

Before beginning this process, what was your organization’s annual carbon emissions? How much did you reduce this? And how much did you offset? In 2007, which is the baseline for our Carbon Neutral Program, our greenhouse gas emissions were 461 metric tonnes. Our goal is to reduce our 2008 emissions by 10% below this level. Our quarterly estimates show that we are on track to meet this target. Early in 2009, when we calculate our actual 2008 emissions, we will buy carbon offsets to compensate for all remaining emissions.

Are you purchasing credits directly from projects, or using a carbon offset provider? Or becoming neutral some other way? For our Canadian operations, we are buying high quality carbon offsets from Planetair (www.planetair.ca). We are currently evaluating carbon offset providers for our U.S. locations, and will make a decision shortly.

Which projects are you funding? And why did you choose those? The offsets for our Canadian operations will be used to support a green wind energy project in Madagascar. We chose this project because renewable energy projects are one of the most credible types of offsets, since they produce an immediate, measurable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Wind energy is also one of the greenest types of energy, with some of the least side effects. All the Planetair offsets are also Gold Standard offsets, which means they meet the most rigorous standards.

What is the overall effect on your company’s financial bottom line? The cost of the offsets themselves should not affect our bottom line, because we are paying for them through a CARBON charge on every customer’s order. This charge is very small – only 22 cents – but it is calculated to be enough to cover the cost of offsets. We have passed this charge on to customers because we believe all of us need to take responsibility for the carbon footprint of our grocery purchases, and to do our part to fight climate change.

Our customers are generally very environmentally conscious and have supported our carbon neutral efforts, so we are confident that in the long term our Carbon Neutral Program will give us a competitive advantage and help grow our bottom line. As each day goes by, people are realizing the magnitude of the climate change crisis, and that we must take immediate steps to address it. spud! offers our customers an easy way to neutralize the carbon emissions of their grocery purchases, and to become more sustainable consumers overall.

What is the most exciting feedback you have received from your customers, partners or the media? We have received a variety of media coverage, including from the Vancouver Sun, The Province, Global TV and various business publications.

Publications for small business are especially interested in our carbon neutral campaign. Many of these companies also want to reduce their carbon footprint and are turning to spud! for information and inspiration.

What sort of effects are you making to publicize your initiatives among the public, and media?
spud! is thrilled to publicize our efforts in our customer communications as well as in the media. This publicity helps to energize others who want to do the same and perhaps challenges other companies to become more sustainable and responsible businesses.

How has the recent financial meltdown in NA affected your company’s policies on offsetting? Have you put any plans on hold? One problem is that the financial crisis has resulted in a huge depreciation of the Canadian dollar. Our carbon offsets are denominated in Euros, which has meant that we are facing a big increase in the cost of our offsets. No one could have predicted this situation close to a year ago when we decided to buy these offsets, but we have to deal with this situation now.

We’re hoping the dollar will strengthen a bit before we make our payment, but if it doesn’t, it will mean less money will be available to help defer the cost of energy-saving initiatives, which is one other thing we had intended to use any surplus CARBON fund money for.

Have any other companies contacted you for advice on offsetting? If so, what kinds of questions are they asking? Since our participation in the Climate Smart pilot workshop in 2007, I have made several presentations to the Climate Smart Workshop program. At these workshops, I have answered dozens of questions from other businesses who are learning to become carbon neutral.

The questions have been extremely varied, but one of the most common questions has been about the difficulties of implementing our program. I tell people that one of the most difficult things is to get staff to buy in to changes. Organizational changes, especially deep, across the board changes that are necessary to save energy, do not come easy. People are creatures of habit and they all have strong opinions about how things should be done. We try to involve as many people as possible in the planning process and to be open to other viewpoints, but it’s still not always easy to get everyone on the same page. Of course, we just keep plugging along and making steady improvements, which we think over time will make a real difference.

By the way, the Climate Smart program is being steadily expanded and its administrators, Ecotrust Canada and the Pembina Institute, hope to broaden it to cover organizations right across B.C.

::spud! website

Thank you, Norman!

For more offsetting advice, browse Carbon Catalog’s archives:
Green wind energy in Madagascar
Guide To Greening Your Business Convention
TreeHugger’s John Laumer on Managing Corporate Carbon Legally
Show Your Customers You Know Your GreenHouse Gases

The Carbon Offset Provider Evaluation Matrix (COPEM for short) was published by Carbon Concierge, a carbon neutral consultancy for businesses (see earlier coverage). The COPEM report evaluates and rates 17 North American offset providers based on 8 criteria, from transparency and offset quality to education and social benefit.

Think of COPEM as a beefed-up version of our own provider ratings, with more emphasis on ’soft’ factors that our online aggregator can’t capture. Broadly speaking, COPEM’s ranking correlates with our own, but there are also some notable differences.

Native Energy, for example, is rated top in COPEM but only receives a middling rank in Carbon Catalog. This is because we give a lot of credit for financial transparency online, and Native Energy don’t reveal anything on their web site about how offset money is spent.

One finding in the COPEM report that matches our own experience is the lack of correlation between a provider’s pricing and its rating. This underlines the need for offset buyers to research their options thoroughly, and not judge based on price alone.

The full COPEM report can be downloaded here (PDF). As an added twist, Carbon Concierge offers a consulting service to help companies choose an offset provider based on the COPEM factors that are most important to them - more information here.

The second interesting report is the Carbon Offsetting Trends Survey 2008, published by EcoSecurities and ClimateBiz. EcoSecurities is a publicly-traded CDM carbon credit wholesaler which is also active in the voluntary market, while ClimateBiz is a news site which describes itself as “The Business Resource for Climate Management”.

The Trends report is based on data provided by 65 large companies, covering their attitude to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and purchasing carbon offsets. The companies are in a wide range of business sectors, with heavy weighting towards IT, finance and retail.

As the report itself acknowledges, it’s hard to interpret some of the results, since the respondents are self-selecting and so naturally at the forefront of corporate environmental responsibility. Nonetheless some interesting facts emerge, especially about offset buying preferences.

Energy efficiency and wind power projects are the most popular project types, closely followed by biomass, landfill gas and small-scale hydro. The most popular standards are the Voluntary Carbon Standard and Gold Standard. When selecting an offset provider, experience in the market is the most important factor, and (notably) not the price.

One fact which surprised me is that 23% of respondents said their company prefers to develop its own projects, rather than buy offsets through a developer, broker or retailer. If this percentage grows, it will present a challenge and an opportunity for offset providers to reexamine their business model.

The full Trends report is available via EcoSecurities’ site or by direct download (PDF).

Links to these reports and many more can also be found in the new resources section of our Carbon Offset Guide. What else do you want to know?

But the Earth hasn’t stopped turning and we haven’t stopped pouring carbon into the atmosphere. Nor have we stopped burning up our fossil fuels. At best we’ve slowed down a little.

I’d take things a step further. The capitalist system depends on constant economic growth. We expect interest rates above the rate of inflation. This allows us to get richer, in terms of real-world goods, simply by lending out money. But the economy depends on a finite planet. What happens when we run into the limits of this planet, like depleted oil reserves or climate-induced shrinkage of the agriculture base? How can we keep growing then?

Was ecology, in fact, one of the underlying causes of the financial meltdown? Were oil prices of $150 per barrel, with corresponding gas and food price hikes, the last straws for suburban America? Families squeezed on fuel, food and mortgage payments started defaulting on the latter, and the system came tumbling down. During the 2000s, the only way to sustain the building binge was through sub-prime mortgages, dutifully funded by China and others, yet with little hope of being paid back. Is this a sign that America’s suburban sprawl, so wasteful of energy, is coming to an end?

Only time will tell. I can’t claim that oil and commodity prices were the primary cause of recent events. Looking at the history of the ratio between property prices and incomes, houses had become massively overvalued throughout the past decade, way before the oil spike. Nonetheless the constant growth in debt, house size and oil consumption do have something in common - unsustainability.

Things can’t keep getting bigger and better unless we remove any obstacles lying along the way. In the case of energy and the environment, upon which so much depends, this means investing in renewables. Only by switching our main energy source from (finite and dwindling) fossil fuels to the (effectively infinite) sun - directly via solar power, or indirectly via wind, biomass and hydro - can we avoid the looming energy crisis and continue on a path of perpetual growth.

The transition is inevitable. As fossil fuels run out, the switch to renewables will undoubtedly occur. It’s just a question of when, and at what cost in human and economic terms. Now that the oil price has dropped, we have perhaps the last and best opportunity to build up renewable capacity on the cheap, and so avoid the nastier effects of the energy and climate crises to come.

Trouble is, the free market will be transfixed by the drop in energy prices. Private investors want to see returns within a decade, and when oil is cheap, this window is too narrow to motivate investments in renewable energy. That’s why we need government action, combined with consumer and corporate voluntarism, to spur the process on.

The carbon market, with all its shortcomings, is neatly tailored for this end. It can play a major role in allocating capital to the sustainable energy projects that will power our collective future. When the world pulls out of this financial crisis, be it 2 or 20 years from now, I believe oil prices will go far higher than anything we’ve seen before. Let’s hope we’re as ready as we can be.