House carbon offsets “a waste of taxpayer money”
January 28th, 2008If you must buy carbon offsets, caveat emptor — in particular, don’t buy them from the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). That is the point of a terrific front-page article in today’s Washington Post “Value of U.S. House’s Carbon Offsets Is Murky, Some Question Effectiveness of $89,000 Purchase to Balance Out Greenhouse Gas Emissions.”
Yes, it is nice to be quoted above the fold in any major newspaper — the quote in the headline is from me — but the reason I think the article is important is that the reporter took the time to track down the offset projects the taxpayer money went to. The results are not encouraging. I am not a fan of offsets (see my many posts dissing “Offsets” under that category on this blog’s side bar) — and certainly wasn’t a fan of the House buying offsets from the CCX in the first place.
But I was surprised by the overall lameness of the specific projects and utterly shocked to read the words of CCX CEO Richard Sandor (a man I have a fair amount of respect for):
It basically rewards people for having done things that had environmental good in the past and incentivizes people to do things that have environmental good in the future.
Shame on him for having this policy, and double shame if he actually believes it is the right thing. Offset money is supposed to cause carbon emissions reductions that would not otherwise have happened without that money (the so-called additionality criteria), in order to offset our own emissions (which we have first worked hard to reduce). We are most certainly not expecting our money go to rewarding people for having done things that had environmental benefit in the past. Geez — I’ve done a whole bunch of things that had environmental benefit in the past — see list here — does that mean I’m entitled to some of Sandor’s CCX money? Absurd!
An old friend of mind, consultant Mark Trexler, put it well in the article when he said,
If you don’t have additionality, you know what you’re getting. You’re getting nothing.
Kudos to uber-capitalist Sandor. He has proven you can get nothing for something.
January 28th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Joe:
TerraPass has avoided soil offsets on CCX for the same reasons cited in the article.
One technical correction, though. Additionality requires proof of the expectation of carbon revenues being a decisive factor in the project go ahead, not necessarily receipt of those revenues.
Plenty of dairy farmers have seen other commodity prices rise in the past, and some of them are banking their credits hoping to sell them at a higher price later. That doesn’t affect the fact that without carbon revenues, the projects are poor investments, and that with carbon revenues they are OK. Thats the real mark of financial additionality, not the timing of the receipt of the revenues.
Cheers,
Tom Arnold
Founder
TerraPass
January 28th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Or you can get a certificate suitable for framing for free!
http://www.freecarbonoffsets.com
January 28th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Intel says it will purchase more than 1.3 billion kilowatt hours a year of “renewable energy certificates”.
I was surprised that the EPA has a list of the big buyers of RECs: http://www.epa.gov/grnpower/toplists/top25.htm
Intel now is #1 on the list. The providers are listed as “Austin Energy, PNM, Sterling Planet” and the green power is listed as “Biomass, Geothermal, Solar, Wind”.
Does anyone know more about what they are doing?
February 5th, 2008 at 2:20 am
Lets give it a name
I say Global Carbon March
Inter our exhaust
I don’t see any mention on your web site of Pyrolysis or Agrichar . Do you have projects in the planning stage on the carbon sequestration front?
The more you learn about this ancient technique of soil restoration the more you’ll see how elegant this solution can be for carbon sequestration, for us all.
Imagine putting the carbon tax funds into the hands of millions of peasant farmers all around the world, building their soil and their net worth at the same time. Please search “AGRICHAR” “BIOCHAR” or
“TERRA PRETA”