Carbon Footprints

There’s a nice story in Toronto’s The Star, Using carbon credits to make a difference.

Cybele Young is taking global warming into her own hands.

She’s doing whatever she can to reduce her ecological footprint. She buys organic produce and locally raised meat. If she needs to travel somewhere out of bicycle range, she borrows her parents’ car – she’s planning to join a car share to rent her wheels by the hour. She’s trying to scrape together money to retrofit her 1920s two-storey with solar panels and a green roof.

“We’re looking into whatever we can find,” she says, “anywhere we can lessen the impact.” Young, 35, a downtown Toronto resident and mother of two, is also eyeing the hottest trend in environmentalism since reducing, reusing and recycling: carbon credits. They give pollution a dollar value and allow people to buy permission to emit carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

Young says paying for the privilege to pollute makes her keener to reduce her carbon-emitting habits. “It’s one more step where we can make a difference.”

Tat Smith, dean of the faculty of forestry at the University of Toronto, applauds the idea of buying credits, but cautions that it’s important to pay into projects that are audited by a third party – to make sure they’re beneficial. “The basic principle behind tradable credits is a good one,” he says. “But we should all be looking for ways to do reduce our net emissions.”

That’s exactly what Young says she’s doing. She’s doesn’t plan on buying credits to earn a licence to pollute. It’s empowering, she says, to be able to do something to change the world – especially if she can’t afford a hybrid car.

Here’s roughly how Carbon Planet’s retailing of Carbon Credits works:

Money you spend with us on carbon credits is channelled to projects that reduce atmospheric CO₂, and prevent CO₂ from reaching the atmosphere. — DS

Technorati Tags: Canada, carbon credits, carbon neutral, carbon offsetting, Carbon Planet, climate change, emissions reduction, emissions trading, global warming

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Forces for Good, The Carbon Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.