On May 21, 2010

Welcome to the wild wild west, the unregulated world of carbon offsets. A place where there are no rules, no regulation, and more snake oil salesmen than legitimate ventures. It’s an industry with a lot of promise and a long way to go to gain credibility. This post should help serve as a guide for what to watch out for when buying carbon offsets.

The most important thing to look for when examining carbon offset providers is verification. How are the offsets measured and how can you be sure those offsets took place? There are no Carbon Offset laws or regulations in the United States. With most offset companies, you’re simply hoping for the best. Such opaqueness should raise a red flag. Before you purchase offsets, make sure you know where those offsets were sourced from and how they are verified.

For verification, I prefer the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). Their projects are independently verified and they require all offset projects to be:

  • Rare (e.g. best-in-class actions)
  • Voluntary (e.g. not legally required)
  • Recent
  • Verifiable
  • Properly addresses permanence
  • Avoids the creation of perverse incentives that would result in increases in GHG emissions on or off the project site
  • Conservative

All our offsets are sourced from projects that meet all of the CCX criteria. We also plan to offer third party auditor reports at the end of the year, for all offsets we sell. We do this to be as transparent as possible with the offset process, so that our customers know they had a positive impact on the environment. Whatever offset provider you chose, make sure that they are providing verified offsets that meet all of the CCX criteria. Also ask the company about their company auditing process. Do they have third party auditors verify their offset process? If not, why don’t they? If an offset company can’t clearly show proof and validity of the offsets, keep looking.

A recent Christian Scientist Monitor article outlined several questionable practices within the offset industry. A transparent and verifiable process will avoid many of these.

•An offset project in India that cleared plots of traditional tribal farmlands to build windmills for green electric power, upending some farmers’ livelihoods and – in the end – generating significantly less power than expected.
•A tree-planting project in Panama that promises profits for logging as well as calling itself a certified offset program when it is not. Few trees have even been planted.
•Scams in Australia that have prompted the alarmed government to launch a crackdown.
•A California promoter who launched a ship to spread iron dust in the South Pacific to grow carbon-sucking algae, a plan that the Environmental Protection Agency said would amount to illegal dumping at sea.
•An Israeli charity that is selling offsets that are supposed to create brand-new projects, for tree plantings it has been doing for 60 years.

If you’re currently looking for Carbon Offsets and would like to know more about a specific offset project (ours or someone else’s), feel free to comment or contact me directly. I’d be happy to help you make an informed decision. There are a lot of unsavory offset providers out there, make sure you do your homework. Caveat Emptor.