Happy Earth Day!
In order to not go do any of the other stuff I should be doing, I thought I'd talk a little about carbon offsets, since a couple of people asked me to explain how I chose a method for that when I mentioned it earlier this week.
First, a brief explanation: Basically, a carbon offset is something that's meant to compensate for your generation of greenhouse gases. The intent is that you say, okay, I generated X amount of greenhouse gases doing this activity, so I'm going to turn around and remove those gases from the global system somewhere else. Because climate change doesn't work regionally--putting more carbon dioxide into the air over LA than into the air over Antarctica doesn't mean that climate change will be worse in LA--this should theoretically make your activity climate-neutral, just like, say, withdrawing money from your checking account at one ATM and then depositing the same amount of money back into the same account from a different ATM.
In practice, it's not quite that simple. (I'm not going to get into the "is carbon offsetting even a good idea?" arguments here; I think there are a couple of them that area reasonable, but I've decided this is a choice I feel ethically comfortable with.) In order to be able to take credit for reducing greenhouse gases elsewhere, you have to feel comfortable that the folks you just gave money to are actually using the money to do something that does reduce emissions--something that no one else is taking credit for and that would not have happened if you hadn't purchased those credits. I mean, let's say you give a thousand dollars to an artist to paint something that she was going to paint anyway. The artist is probably happy to have the thousand dollars, but that doesn't mean you can take credit for the painting. Whereas if she'd originally meant to paint something completely different--or to quit painting and take up sculpture instead--you can take that credit.
The Tufts Climate Initiative has a useful introduction to voluntary offsetting for air travel here, but it's fairly new; when I first started offsetting my air travel, it wasn't available, and the folks I use are not one of the groups they evaluate. I offset through the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and I honestly couldn't tell you how I first found them; if I had to guess, I'd say that they were involved in a project I heard about through work when I lived in Washington. The reasons I decided I felt comfortable about offsetting through them were basically:
1) They're a nonprofit. I'm not trying to say that I think a for-profit offsetter is necessarily going to be bad. (At least one comes out very well in TCI's evaluation, for instance, and I do believe in the power of the profit motive.) But I personally feel more comfortable working with a group that's not going to have as much of a motivation to do insufficient projects on the cheap.
2) They were local. Obviously they aren't anymore now that I've moved, but I liked that their projects were mostly located in my part of the country. I'm more motivated by reducing American emissions than Brazilian ones, global system or no global system.
3) They're clear about what their projects are, and I found it believable that their involvement had a real impact on making those projects happen. For instance, they've made available their past two reports to the Bonneville Power Administration on projects they've funded, and they have a list on their website of all of the projects that they sell credits from. They've been doing a lot of small-scale work recently, making grants for extremely small-scale wind projects and that kind of thing, stuff that people would be a lot less likely to do with a thirty-five year payback period than with a five-year post-grant payback period.
4) They describe their methodology. They give you the numbers they use for calculating emissions. (Okay, it's in a footnote in the FAQ. But not that hard to find if you look.)
5) They're associated with groups I find trustworthy. They have a couple of certifications of their product, but honestly, I haven't done the second level of research required to be able to say whether or not I trust the certifiers. I do trust that people like the NRDC and OSU have done some of that research.
So... that's it, basically. BEF is definitely on the more expensive end for this kind of thing, but I feel settled with them and will probably continue to support them.
First, a brief explanation: Basically, a carbon offset is something that's meant to compensate for your generation of greenhouse gases. The intent is that you say, okay, I generated X amount of greenhouse gases doing this activity, so I'm going to turn around and remove those gases from the global system somewhere else. Because climate change doesn't work regionally--putting more carbon dioxide into the air over LA than into the air over Antarctica doesn't mean that climate change will be worse in LA--this should theoretically make your activity climate-neutral, just like, say, withdrawing money from your checking account at one ATM and then depositing the same amount of money back into the same account from a different ATM.
In practice, it's not quite that simple. (I'm not going to get into the "is carbon offsetting even a good idea?" arguments here; I think there are a couple of them that area reasonable, but I've decided this is a choice I feel ethically comfortable with.) In order to be able to take credit for reducing greenhouse gases elsewhere, you have to feel comfortable that the folks you just gave money to are actually using the money to do something that does reduce emissions--something that no one else is taking credit for and that would not have happened if you hadn't purchased those credits. I mean, let's say you give a thousand dollars to an artist to paint something that she was going to paint anyway. The artist is probably happy to have the thousand dollars, but that doesn't mean you can take credit for the painting. Whereas if she'd originally meant to paint something completely different--or to quit painting and take up sculpture instead--you can take that credit.
The Tufts Climate Initiative has a useful introduction to voluntary offsetting for air travel here, but it's fairly new; when I first started offsetting my air travel, it wasn't available, and the folks I use are not one of the groups they evaluate. I offset through the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, and I honestly couldn't tell you how I first found them; if I had to guess, I'd say that they were involved in a project I heard about through work when I lived in Washington. The reasons I decided I felt comfortable about offsetting through them were basically:
1) They're a nonprofit. I'm not trying to say that I think a for-profit offsetter is necessarily going to be bad. (At least one comes out very well in TCI's evaluation, for instance, and I do believe in the power of the profit motive.) But I personally feel more comfortable working with a group that's not going to have as much of a motivation to do insufficient projects on the cheap.
2) They were local. Obviously they aren't anymore now that I've moved, but I liked that their projects were mostly located in my part of the country. I'm more motivated by reducing American emissions than Brazilian ones, global system or no global system.
3) They're clear about what their projects are, and I found it believable that their involvement had a real impact on making those projects happen. For instance, they've made available their past two reports to the Bonneville Power Administration on projects they've funded, and they have a list on their website of all of the projects that they sell credits from. They've been doing a lot of small-scale work recently, making grants for extremely small-scale wind projects and that kind of thing, stuff that people would be a lot less likely to do with a thirty-five year payback period than with a five-year post-grant payback period.
4) They describe their methodology. They give you the numbers they use for calculating emissions. (Okay, it's in a footnote in the FAQ. But not that hard to find if you look.)
5) They're associated with groups I find trustworthy. They have a couple of certifications of their product, but honestly, I haven't done the second level of research required to be able to say whether or not I trust the certifiers. I do trust that people like the NRDC and OSU have done some of that research.
So... that's it, basically. BEF is definitely on the more expensive end for this kind of thing, but I feel settled with them and will probably continue to support them.