Buyer beware, be sure to buy legitimate carbon credits.
In the UK The Guardian is running a story You feel better, but is your carbon offset just hot air? that points out that in the world of carbon credits and the various businesses that have emerged to offer carbon offsets there are sharks in the water.
Francis Sullivan, a carbon offset expert who led attempts by banking group HSBC to neutralise its emissions, said: “There will be individuals and companies out there who think they’re doing the right thing but they’re not. I am sure that people are buying offsets in this unregulated market that are not credible. I am sure there are people buying nothing more than hot air.”
When we started Carbon Planet in January 2000 we had no idea what we were doing, just a vague idea of what we wanted to do. We spent 4 years researching the carbon credits industry, consulting with all manner of people, forestry experts, green groups, leftists, the World Bank’s carbon fund people and more. We were trying to work out how carbon credits are created and certified, and then what it would actually mean to retail them.
We decided that we would really only deal with the highest grade of carbon credit, ones that actually properly certified that a tonne of CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere and stored for a very long time. The Kyoto Protocol mandates 30 years of storage, The Australian NGAC standard mandates 100 years.
Genuine carbon credits really do perform as advertised but there are hundreds of schemes out in the market place that offer vague promises such as tree-planting or investment in green energy schemes. Unlike such snake-oil schemes, when you buy carbon credits from Carbon Planet we actually sell you carbon credits. That means when you give us your money, we transfer carbon credits into an account with the Greenhouse Gas Registry, maintained by the New South Wales Government. You can log into the registry online and check out the credits you own yourself.
Mark Kenber of the environmental organisation the Climate Group said: “There are plenty of projects out there that are rigorous and have no problems at all. Then there are plenty that are not truly additional and you could question the baseline used. Then there are suspicions that people have sold the same ton of carbon to four or five different customers.”
The registry prevents the sort of double dipping that Mr Kenber refers to above.
I am very proud of the work Carbon Planet has done to ensure the veracity of its business. It pains me to see people throw their money away on vague promises when there are simple, reliable, high quality carbon offset schemes that really do perform as advertised. When you are considering buying carbon offsets of any kind, ask your supplier how those offsets actually work, and how you can prove it. Ask them how long the CO2 is stored for and what certification backs up their claims.
This is a new industry and the cowboys are out in force. — DS
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