Saturday, December 1, 2007

Carbon Offset Providers

I have been interested in some time in the idea of purchasing carbon offsets, a way for individuals and organizations to fund projects to reduce the world's greenhouse gas emissions or "carbon footprint."

This report, published in December 2006, provides detailed information about carbon offsets and finds eight "Tier 1" organizations that satisfy a number of criteria to increase the probability that the carbon offsets purchased will have a real effect reducing carbon emissions. These eight organizations (in alphabetical order) are:

  1. AgCert/DrivingGreen (Ireland) www.drivinggreen.com
  2. atmosfair (Germany) www.atmosfair.de
  3. Carbon Neutral Co. (England) www.carbonneutral.com
  4. Climate Care (England) www.climatecare.org
  5. Climate Trust (U.S.) www.climatetrust.org
  6. co2balance (England) www.co2balance.com
  7. Native Energy (U.S.) www.nativeenergy.com
  8. Sustainable Travel Int'l (U.S.) www.sustainabletravelinternational.org
Over the holiday season, environmentally conscious travellers might consider offsetting the carbon emissions of their travel. And some of these organizations make it possible to provide carbon offset gifts.

The report is careful to emphasize, however, that individual's efforts to reduce one's carbon emissions through lifestyle and consuming choices are most important.

5 comments:

A-M said...

I am not sure how these for profit companies would be doing this...the orgs make sense but being a profit driven organization seems hypocritical to me.

Anonymous said...

Actually, at least Climate Trust is a non-profit! I don't think AM looked at all the companies

http://www.climatetrust.org/about_us.php

Anonymous said...

I think what AM was thinking is that the .org links may be superior to the .com links

Gary said...

Whether an organization using .com or .org in their URL does not necessarily indicate profit or non-profit status. I would suspect that these are all non-profit, but i haven't checked them al.

Anonymous said...

Having the .com in the URL guarantees profit status, right?