Saturday, October 11, 2008

Carbon Offsetting 101

As promised, I spent some time this week looking into the phenomenon which is Carbon Offsetting. I started my quest at treehugger.com and quickly found a good starting point:

EcoBusinessLink has a good survey of various carbon offset companies and organization with details around price, project types, offset types, and certifications. I decided to check out Carbonfund.org, because they have multiple certifications, are not for profit, and allow a choice of which project type to support (e.g. Efficiency & Carbon Credits vs. Renewables & Methane).

The process was surprisingly straightforward. You simply pick a calculator (I picked "Flight," because I want to offset my upcoming flight to Sweden), enter airport information, click calculate, and add to cart:

My carbon offset price ended up at $15.22. I chose to funnel that money to Reforestation & Sequestration. I like trees. It took approximately three minutes to complete the entire order.

I'm hooked.

3 comments:

appwiz said...

Would you like to purchase carbon offsets for a price 15% lesser than the competition?

Tabita said...

See - that's what I don't get. Why would it be cheaper to offset e.g. air travel in one place than another?

appwiz said...

I still think carbon offset trading is an Enron-like scam waiting to happen. Watch http://www.hulu.com/watch/37780/king-of-the-hill-earthy-girls-are-easy?c=Animation-and-Cartoons