 Obama and Clinton are neck-in-neck in a very hot race for presidential candidacy. But who will be the best Democrat for the planet?
According to Salon, the greatest threat to America’s future won’t be terrorist attacks or national security, it will be the effects of global warming and unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions.
So what are the Democrat candidates’ take on this issue? Read More »
 WWF, the World Wide Fund for Nature, just released a report on standards in the carbon offset industry. The report’s full title is “A Comparison of Carbon Offset Standards - Making Sense of the Voluntary Carbon Market”. You can download the PDF here (3 Mb).
Carbon is often described as the world’s most complex commodity. A tonne of carbon is nothing like a barrel of oil or a bushel of wheat. It’s a promise to prevent emissions that would otherwise have taken place. But you can’t see or smell a carbon emission, and who knows the answer to “what if”? As a purchaser of offsets, how can you make sure you’re buying the real deal?
While in theory it’s possible to evaluate offsets, it’s no cakewalk. A standard makes life easier by letting you rely on the expertise of the best. Think of it this way: if your doctor has a degree from Harvard, would you check if he knows an elbow from a knee?
The report suggests 3 standards will dominate in the coming years: Read More »
The Internet makes almost everything easier these days – buying plane tickets, finding your true love, and managing your finances. But tread warily if you go online to reduce your carbon footprint, warns the Scotsman today.
“Carbon offsetting websites are inconsistent and confusing, with costs varying by up to 540 per cent,” says the Scotsman. The paper is referring to a new report by Which? Money, whereby the business paper found enormous variability in how a carbon offset provider calculates a carbon footprint, and how much they charge to reduce it. Read More »
    
Choosing how to offset your carbon dioxide emissions is complicated business. Readers have been asking us: what’s the difference between providers who offset for profit, and those who offset as non-profit organizations?
In our quest to find some answers we spoke with five different prominent non-profit providers from around the world – the United States, France, the UK, Canada and Switzerland.
Concern about global warming was the common denominator for all, as well as offering tax credits only to citizens of the country they were operating within. But each offered a different rationale for the non-profit designation.
Of course we’ll be able to paint a more colorful picture of carbon offset providers when we interview for-profit providers in the coming weeks. Until then, here’s some non-profit tidbits that we picked out from the interviews. Read More »
March 18, 2008 – 12:46 am
 Making our way around the globe, today we speak with Canada’s non-profit carbon offset provider Offsetters.
In previous weeks, we’ve met with Goodplanet/Action Carbone from France who does not see “the offsetting environment as a competition.”
There’s been the non-profit take of the Swiss-based myclimate. They believe climate protection should not be done to “increase your own wealth.”
“We want to make every effort to keep our eye on the ball – and that means fighting global warming,” says CarbonFund from the US.
And over in the UK, PURE rationalizes its non-profit status, “PURE originated because of a pent-up demand from individuals and companies that wanted to voluntarily buy/cancel small volumes of Kyoto quality CER credits for offsetting purposes…”
Based in Canada, today we chat with James Tansey, Co-founder and CEO of Offsetters. Taking another approach altogether, it seems that a hybrid business model is in Offsetter’s future.
Read on for the full interview. Read More »
Large-scale events, cycles and processes can be best grasped through graphs, flow-charts and maps. If you’re resourceful, you can even use software that helps you generate your own.
At Carbon Catalog, we’ve added a feature from Google maps that lets our readers pinpoint the location of the offset project – many of which are in far-flung locations (see right of projects’ listing). Read More »
It’s been 6 months since Carbon Catalog was launched, and 3 months since the first blog post. It’s time to talk about some recent updates to the site as well as future directions.
The most popular page on Carbon Catalog is the list of offset providers. This lets you compare and contrast 74 (and growing!) offset providers at a glance. The list includes location, pricing and our own check-based rating. Based on feedback received, two recent improvements have been made:
- When you mouse over the check marks in the ‘Criteria’ column, a pop-up box appears explaining the checks in detail. No more guessing the meaning of each tick!
- Currency conversions now let you compare pricing across different continents. With help from the good folk at the European Central Bank, the rates are updated daily. New links at the bottom of the provider list let you view prices in your chosen currency.
Beyond these minor interface changes, the biggest challenge of running Carbon Catalog is keeping the content updated. Read More »
February 27, 2008 – 1:30 am
 In our last post on the topic, we talked about CO2e being a handy unit of currency – one which we can use to make sense of the different kinds of greenhouses gases and their effects.
Even though CO2e may be closer to an estimate than “exact change,” it gives offset providers (and projects) the ability to roughly quantify the impact of a carbon offset project.
We already know that not all greenhouse gases are created equal. And it might be strange to learn that sometimes offset projects create CO2 emissions in order to offset carbon. Are you scratching your head?
Think of it as the lesser of two evils. Take methane gas flaring projects, for example.
Reducing methane (CH4) gas from seeping into the atmosphere may have a bigger overall impact on slowing down global warming, even if carbon dioxide is produced in the process. Read More »
February 22, 2008 – 4:54 am
Remember back in the old days when companies started labeling products with ‘made from recycled materials’ logos? People bought into it because it made a lot of sense to buy things like paper and plastics from recycled sources. The concept caught on like wildfire and started driving a whole new area in consumer marketing.
Now in the UK, product labeling has taken an entirely new direction, and Brits will soon get to know the carbon footprint of a popular beer brand too, reports The Guardian.
An innocuous brand of potato chips (or crisps if you’re a Brit) called Walkers have started labeling its carbon impact. It turns out that a 34.5g bag of Walkers chips (the cheese and onion flavor) costs the environment twice its weight (75g) in CO2e to produce. (Read on because we’re going to tell you how little it will cost to offset that.) Read More »
February 21, 2008 – 7:25 am
This week, the UK government finally released its Code of Best Practice for carbon offsetting. Actually, it’s just a draft, and even that took a year of debate and consultations. That’s what happens when government tries to get its head around controversy, confusion, and more than a few vested interests.
You can read the full document here (PDF). Here’s our summary of the most interesting tidbits: Read More »
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