Mindstates
Personal Carbon Offsets:
Settling accounts with our planet
By Bill Avrin
You saw Al Gore’s movie; that was easy. You use compact fluorescent lightbulbs, or keep meaning to. You buy your food locally, or feel you should. Yet, if you’re like most of us, you drive to work. You run the air conditioner.
You fly once in awhile. Each of those choices burns a little fossil fuel, puts a little carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and moves earth’s thermometer a little farther into the red zone.
I’m the kind who worries about such things every time I turn on the lights. Recently, I decided to try and do more than feel guilty. My goal was to zero out my carbon footprint, that is, the greenhouse gas emissions that I create. In pursuing that goal, I learned a lot about how I use energy, how we can all use less, and how we can use personal carbon offsets to make up for those greenhouse gas emissions that we can’t easily avoid.
The fastest and cheapest way to reduce your carbon footprint is to save energy. Kurt Zwally of the National Wildlife Federation told me that the first two things we should all do are, “Switch to compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) and make sure your next car or appliance is energy efficient.” Your car is the single biggest energy-saving choice you can make. It typically produces more than a quarter of your greenhouse emissions. Appliances are also big energy users, accounting for nearly a sixth of our emissions. CFLs are a huge gain for very little cost. In its eighteen-year life, a CFL that costs three dollars can save greenhouse emissions equivalent to driving a midsized car nearly 4000 miles.
I use CFLs. I turn things off when I’m not using them. I drive a Honda Insight, a hybrid car that gives me 64 miles per gallon. Living in mild San Diego, I don’t use the heat or air conditioning. I use about a quarter as much gasoline as the average American does, and about half as much electricity as the average apartment dweller.
To see how I was doing, I used an online carbon footprint calculator on carbonfootprint.com. I was surprised to find that only a third of my estimated footprint came from the gasoline and electricity that I use directly. The larger part, which is hard to estimate accurately, came indirectly, in producing the food I eat and the products I buy.
My greenhouse emissions, about six tons of carbon dioxide per year, are less than a third of the US average, but three times what we have a right to produce. To avoid catastrophic climate change, scientists say we need to reduce global greenhouse emissions to half of today’s levels by 2050. That’s about two tons of carbon dioxide per year, per person worldwide.
Although I can still save energy, most of my remaining carbon emissions are from sources hard for me to control. To cancel them out, I looked into carbon offsets: balancing my own greenhouse emissions by paying somebody to reduce emissions elsewhere.
I found dozens of providers offering a bewildering range of offsets: Renewable energy, energy efficiency, planting trees, collecting methane from landfills and coalmines. I also found a loud argument about the validity of carbon offsets. Problems include verifying that providers do what they promise, that it actually reduces net emissions, and that your purchase actually causes the reduction instead of just paying somebody a bonus for something they would have done anyway.
To avoid those problems, I looked for providers certified under “Green-e Climate,” a new protocol for verifying carbon offsets from renewable energy. I asked Jeff Deyette from the Union of Concerned Scientists whether the new protocol was reliable. Jeff told me that, though UCS hasn’t yet studied the new standard in detail, it has high confidence in Green-e’s previous renewable energy standards, and has no reason to think the new protocol would be less effective.
Compared with renewable energy, carbon offsets by protecting forests seem more difficult to verify. I also felt that, since the biggest part of global warming comes from burning fossil fuels, the biggest part of the solution has to come from producing energy without fossil fuels.
For those reasons, I decided to offset my carbon footprint by buying renewable energy certificates (RECs) from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. By buying RECs, I subsidized a clean power provider to generate a certain amount of electrical energy that would otherwise have been generated by burning fossil fuel. That is, I paid the difference between the market price of the electricity itself, and the slightly higher cost of generating it cleanly. I bought RECs for 8 megawatt-hours of wind-powered electricity, enough to offset my year’s estimated greenhouse emissions. It cost $160.
I feel better about turning on the lights. Did I accomplish anything else? I reduced the world’s carbon emissions, but only by a little. In fact, the world market for personal carbon offsets, though growing, was only $100M last year.
That’s 3000 times smaller than the total US energy market. As Art Cooley, the founding director of the Environmental Defense Fund told me, “While that’s a good start, and it certainly makes people feel good, it’s going to take a much larger reduction in greenhouse emissions if we’re going to avoid the consequences of global warming.”
To beat global warming, we need to transform our energy economy. That has to come from political change. Still, if enough of us buy renewable energy credits, our personal choices can help reduce carbon dioxide emissions and stimulate sustainable energy technology.
Perhaps, the biggest value of personal action is what it teaches us. I’ve reduced my carbon footprint by taking some basic, and basically painless steps. Offsetting the rest of it cost less than one percent of my year’s living expenses. To me, this experience suggests that we really can beat global warming, and it doesn’t have to be as hard as many of us fear.
Bill Avrin is a physicist, a writer and a volunteer with the California Center for Sustainable Energy, a nonprofit organization working to create a sustainable energy future. The Center fosters public policies, administers programs, and provides services and information to help communities, businesses and individuals use energy cleanly and wisely. Visit
www.energycenter.org, for ideas and incentives to tread more lightly on our planet.