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Indulging a Carbon Appetite

April 30, 2007

Al Gore, the Oscar-winning climate change documentarian, has been in a bit of, well, hot water over the carbon footprint of his rather large house outside Nashville. An unflattering comparison between Gore’s home and the smaller Texas ranch house of one George W. Bush, which has rainwater capture, ground source heat pumps, and other green features, has been floating around conservative blogs and web sites.

One cheeky commenter called for developing an “Al-Gore-ithm” to calculate the former vice president’s carbon dioxide production.

In his defense, Gore says he has tried to counterbalance his home’s power draw by paying a premium on his electric bill that goes towards non-carbon renewable energy sources. In addition, he has purchased “offsets” to mitigate the home’s carbon footprint.

Gore’s situation, along with a critical article in the March 26, 2007 edition of Business Week, has shined a spotlight on the growing business of buying offsets as a way to lower one’s contribution to the atmosphere’s carbon load without making physical emissions reductions on one’s home or business site. Buying an offset is a way to pay someone else to accomplish the reductions somewhere else.

The offsets business, which is new, growing, and unregulated, has drawn fire, and not only from Gore’s detractors on the political right. Denis Hayes, co-founder of Earth Day and now president of the Seattle-based Bullitt Foundation, likens buying carbon offsets to the corrupt medieval church practice of selling “indulgences” that were supposed to “offset” sins. Hayes told The New York Times in its April 29, 2007 edition that an environmental “Martin Luther” is needed to clean up the business.

The chief problem, according to critics, is that there are no clear standards to ensure that a dollar spent on a carbon offset will yield a dollar’s worth of measurable reduction in carbon dioxide emissions that would not have taken place otherwise.

Another criticism is that buying offsets inappropriately sends a message that using gobs of carbon-based energy is perfectly fine, as long as energy gluttons assuage their guilt with an offsets purchase. Even if carbon offsets accomplish what they advertise, at some point, and soon, emissions must be cut, not merely offset.

Confused? Clean Air-Cool Planet, a New Hampshire-based non-profit, has published a report to help consumers become informed and savvy offsets shoppers. Among the suggested questions that potential buyers should ask of offsets vendors: 1) Are offsets created by specific projects? 2) Do you use an objective standard to ensure that purchases result in carbon reductions that would not have happened otherwise? 3) Do you use an independent third-party to ensure that the offsets deliver the advertised results? 4) Can you show that the offsets are sold only once?

For the record, I buy carbon offsets. I pay the Bonneville Environmental Foundation in Portland, Oregon, $25 per month. A year's worth of payments will cover one year's worth of household electricity and natural gas consumption, as well as one year's worth of gasoline burned by the family car, which comes to a grand total of 21,000 pounds of CO2 emissions annually. If the emissions quantity seems low, it’s partly an accident of geography, since our electric utility obtains most of its juice from hydroelectric dams.

The monthly payments do not cover air travel, for which I buy separate offsets after each trip, nor does it cover our daughter’s car. At 19, she’s old enough to decide the offsets question for herself.

Are offsets sufficient for getting a grip on climate change? Not at all. Are they a reasonable first step? Yes, if the dollars spent yield measurable emissions reduction results.

Caveat emptor.