I’ve been sent this link to this NY Times Article by about 5 or 6 people today and sent it myself to about the same number.  The article is about the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) looking into the carbon offset market, since there is seemingly no standard for what an offset is.  I argue that this is not true.  There are transparent offsets avail for this newly expanding market, serving individuals and business who can’t wait for government to act against global warming.

In the name of disclosure I first need to say: I am about to launch a Carbon Offset business in the next few days, so i have a vested interest in the business.  I have spent a few months researching this business to determine the what sort of service to offer.  I started by trying to build the business by sequestering land from development, in sensitive areas of the world, but found that there was a lack of transparency in that industry and that the competition was mainly creating their own solutions.  Saving an acre of land didn’t necessarily mean the same thing with each vendor, most didn’t say if the fee was to sequester the land forever or just a year.  Even the Nature Conservancy’s “Adopt an Acre” site doesn’t say what it means to adopt an acre.  The same thing can be argued about “planting a tree”.  Sure a tree will trap tons of CO2 over 50-100 years, but only if the tree lives that long.  Is planting a sampling that won’t weigh 100 pounds 5 or 10 years out really offsetting the carbon we burn today?  And again, i want to make offsets easy for people and businesses to use to help change the world.  I’m not looking to create a solution, go plant trees and then create the studies to prove it right.  I want to help people act on their desire to do something about the greenhouse effect.

The solution that i found are exchange traded Carbon Offset commodity contracts.  These are offsets granted to various private and public organizations, via 3rd party certifiers, projects that reduce greenhouse gases.  These groups sell these offsets to other groups such as Utility Companies, looking to offset their CO₂ emissions.   These are the standard, transparent offsets that the FTC says are not available or at least are not widely use. Our business is only uses these exchange trade contract to fill our clients Carbon Offset needs.  I’ll be posting an official announcement when we launch in the next day or two.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Carbon Offsets, Governments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.