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What's Happening from Environmental Building News

January 1, 2007

Report Guides Carbon Offset Customers

Drivers who offset their carbon emissions by buying offsets from TerraPass, one of the companies examined in the Clean Air–Cool Planet report, receive car window decals like this one.

A variety of companies sell products that allow consumers and organizations to reduce their carbon footprint by buying a product, a “carbon offset,” whose revenue goes toward supporting projects that reduce emissions elsewhere. However, the voluntary market for this kind of environmental commodity is immature. In the words of “A Consumer’s Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers,” a December 2006 report from New Hampshire-based Clean Air–Cool Planet, “In the absence of an accepted standard, almost anyone can offer to sell you almost anything and claim that this purchase will make you carbon neutral.” Written by Trexler Climate + Energy Services, Inc., of Portland, Oregon, the report offers several recommendations based on a study of retail offset providers.

The study examined the carbon offset programs of 30 companies and organizations, ranking each based on seven criteria. While it doesn’t provide actual scores or rankings, the report names eight providers that score higher than five out of a possible ten points. Of those top-tier performers, four make carbon offsets readily available to U.S. customers: DrivingGreen™, from AgCert International, LLC; the Climate Trust; NativeEnergy, LLC; and MyClimate™ from Sustainable Travel International. The other four are Atmosfair (Germany); the CarbonNeutral Company, Ltd. (U.K.); Climate Care (U.K.), and Co2Balance (U.K.). Conspicuously missing from this list is TerraPass Inc., in a prominent partnership with Expedia, Inc. to offset airline travel; and the Leonardo Academy’s Cleaner and Greener^®, which has been a major source of offsets for U.S. Green Building Council and its annual Greenbuild conference.

Among the criteria used by the Clean Air–Cool Planet report, the most heavily weighted is how the provider evaluates the quality of its offsets. The report defines quality largely in terms of additionality, the principle that offset revenues should go toward only emissions-reduction projects that would not have happened without the existence of the offset market. In other words, if a project reducing greenhouse gas emissions would have happened anyway, the offset revenue is merely rewarding business as usual. Other criteria cited in the report include the offset buyer’s ability to evaluate the quality of the offsets being sold and transparency in the provider’s offset selection.

Adam Stein of TerraPass questioned the report’s findings, arguing that “the list of top-ranked vendors was largely preordained” given the criteria that were studied. “If you look at the companies that were rated highly in the report, they all tend to develop their own projects rather than sell offsets bought on a market,” said Stein. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he argued, “but it’s not the only approach to this business.” TerraPass purchases most of its offsets through the Chicago Climate Exchange.

Michael Arny, president of the Leonardo Academy, also criticized the report as too narrow-minded. “It’s a useful contribution,” he said, “but it’s focused on carbon, and we focus on carbon and other pollutants, including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury. As people think about offsetting emissions, they should think about offsetting all of them.”

Anticipating its value as a snapshot of a market in the midst of growth and change, the report focuses on educating the consumer and concludes with two useful sets of questions. First, “questions to ask yourself” encourage offset consumers to evaluate what they are doing to avert climate change. Second, “questions to ask a provider” sum up the key criteria used in the report as a set of questions that consumers can use independently to evaluate providers.

Derik Broekhoff, a greenhouse gas protocol expert at the World Resources Institute and a peer reviewer of the report, called it “a first step.” While not addressing specific providers, Broekhoff told EBN that “different ways of producing the commodity” will impact quality. “Let’s say you have two watchmakers and one inspects every watch they sell and one samples every batch,” he said. “The second isn’t deficient, but if you’re trying to evaluate quality, most people would agree it’s better to do the ‘watch-by-watch’ or project-by-project approach.”

Consumers can also look forward to a standard that may provide a basis for certifying offsets. The Center for Resource Solutions in San Francisco, the nonprofit behind the popular Green-e standard for renewable energy credits (see EBN Vol. 15, No. 10), is working on a similar standard for carbon offsets, released for public comment in December 2006. Leonardo Academy has also announced plans to develop an ANSI-accredited standard for offsets (see EBN Vol. 15, No. 9).

– Tristan Roberts

For more information:

Clean Air–Cool Planet
Portsmouth, New Hampshire

The full report is online at:
www.cleanair-coolplanet.org/about/ConsumersGuidetoCarbonOffsets.pdf

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