Green Wombat

Before you give your sweetie a holiday gift of carbon credits to make up for that global-warming flight to Fiji and all those unncessary greenhouse gas-emitting trips to Starbucks in the Subaru, it would be best to read a new report on the burgeoning carbon offset market to make sure your money is not going up in smoke. Responding to people’s desire to do something on a personal level about climate change, nearly three dozen companies and non-profits now offer services to neutralize your contributions to global warming. That’s done by selling an array of "carbon offsets" that are supposed to result in a corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. But the report commissioned by the Portsmouth, New Hampshire-based non-profit Clean Air Cool Planet found that there’s no guarantee that buying offsets will do anything more than assuage your green guilt. "Achievement of personal carbon neutrality is certainly laudable. But pursuing carbon neutrality at the individual level will not solve global warming, or even mitigate it to any significant extent," the report’s authors wrote. "Indeed, the potential for the retail offset market to inform and influence the public regarding global warming is almost certainly as important, if not more important, than its role in reducing actual (greenhouse gas) emissions."

Their conclusion after surveying 30 carbon offset services: "While we can identify top-tier providers based on currently available information, we cannot categorically state that purchasing offsets from them will render you carbon neutral." The reason for that is that offsetting greenhouse gases with personal carbon credits is an incredibly complicated endeavor. To be effective, the offsets purchased must result in additional greenhouse gas reductions that would not have otherwise occurred because of planned projects, government mandates or voluntary programs. For instance, buying credits attributed to Company X’s previous commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions by a certain amount would not make the world cooler. On the other hand, the report says that buying credits purchased on the European carbon trading market – a service Green Wombat wrote about last week – would have an impact on global warming. That’s because the EU Emissions Trading Scheme limits total emissions among participating countries and by purchasing carbon credits you’re taking off the market someone else’s right to emit a certain amount of carbon dioxide, forcing actual reductions.

The offsets also must be permanent. Offsets that go to fund the planting of forests may be effective in eventually absorbing carbon dioxide but if those trees die of disease or perish in a fire so do the global warming benefits. And often there’s no way for consumers to verify that the carbon credits they buy aren’t being "recycled" – sold multiple times for the same project or benefit.

The report did not attempt to evaluate the quality of the offsets offered by such services as Climate Trust or the Carbon Neutral Company but rather rated them on such criteria as the services’ understanding of carbon offsets, the depth of information provided to buyers and whether they used any certification processes or protocols.

There are some voluntary certification programs for carbon offsets but the lack of industry-wide standards ultimately may hold back the market as consumers are left guessing whether they will actually be doing any good with their green.