David Suzuki Weighs In On Carbon Offsets

If you're Canadian you probably already know who David Suzuki is. If not, check out his Wikipedia entry. Summary: an internationally respected scientist turned environmental activist and host of the long-running popular science program The Nature of Things.

So why am I going on about him? A long time climate change activist, he recently turned his attention to carbon offsets. In a succinct, direct piece, he explains carbon offsets and dispatches that old chestnut about offsets being a license to pollute:

But as with anything new, there's been some misunderstanding around carbon offsets. For example, they've been criticized as "papal indulgences", or "buying your way out".

I see it differently. First of all, carbon offset are not an excuse for not reducing our emissions, but using high quality offsets — like those that meet the Gold Standard — can be an innovative way to deal with emissions that you aren't able to reduce yourself.

There it is in a nutshell. I can see why Canadians love this guy!

All You Need to Know About Reducing Carbon in 20 Minutes

Last week's NPR interview with The New Yorker's science reporter, Michael Specter, is one of the best 20-minute summaries of "carbon" news around. Specter also published a long piece in the latest issue of The New Yorker - "Big Foot: In measuring carbon emissions, it's easy to confuse morality and science." In it, he describes carbon dioxide as "a strange but powerful new currency, difficult to evaluate yet impossible to ignore."

One of the questions Specter explores is exactly how to calculate the carbon footprint of a given product (Carbonfund.org has developed a world-class protocol in partnership with the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management for doing exactly that. See also our Carbonfree Product Certification program).

As Specter points out, the answers are not always intuitive. Just because your food is local, for instance, doesn't necessarily mean you're being an environmentally conscious consumer by buying that food.

If you live in New York, for example, buying an apple grown in New York actually causes more carbon dioxide than buying an apple grown in New Zealand, where they use less land, less water, and more geothermal and solar energy to grow them - more than enough to outweigh the environmental cost of shipping those apples 9,000 miles to New York.

2007 Record Year For Carbon Neutral Business

"2007 saw a record number of companies zero out their carbon emissions (or go “carbon neutral”) [and] offer carbon neutral products," according to a new report from consulting firm ICF International - one of the largest and most well-regarded in the business. Voluntary Carbon Offsets Market Outlook examines the factors affecting the growth in the carbon offsets industry. The firm estimates that 220 million tons will be offset in 2012, 1000% more than the 20 million offset in 2006.

It's great to see more and more businesses get serious about hastening the transition to a clean-energy economy, and we're pleased to offer our CarbonFree Business and CarbonFree Products programs are part of the solution.

Milk, Cereal, Bread, Carbon Offsets

Folks in the U.S. may still be skeptical about carbon offsets, but in Norway they've gone retail - and store managers are rushing to restock their supplies after selling out, according to ENN. Carbon offsets are selling there for more than $30 per ton, or roughly six times what we charge at Carbonfund.org.

"This is an offset where we sell a paper saying that this is proof that you have bought a U.N.-approved emissions credit, a CER, from this specific product," Per Otto Larsen, a partner at CO2focus, the company offering the offsets, told Reuters.

According to the story, Norwegians on average are responsible for 11 tons of CO2 emissions. Americans are responsible for 23 tons, on average. The offsets are Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs), or offsets that are certified via the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism.

Carbonfund.org's Report on Paso Pacifico's Return to Forest Reforestation Project

Here it is, as promised: Carbonfund.org's report on our site visit to the Return to Forest Project in Nicaragua (PDF, 1.5MB). I believe the report speaks for itself-- concise but detailed, readable and educational. Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

Carbonfund.org on YouTube: The Tensas River Reforestation Project, Part II

From the crack video production team here at Carbonfund.org, we bring you the Tensas River Reforestation Project:

You can visit Carbonfund.org's YouTube page here.

Reforestation: "Our Only Option" for Removing CO2 Now

While we continue to post pictures and video from our two flagship reforestation projects, it's great to see other blogs stepping up their support for these types of efforts. The Eco Preservation Society Blog posted this piece just a few days ago, repeating the argument that "reforestation is not only a viable option; it is our only option."

"Investing in future technologies to reduce emissions does nothing to remove the CO2 that we have already dumped into the atmosphere. There is only one viable and proven way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and that is through the growth of trees and vegetation," the society writes.

Even if we transition 100 percent to a clean energy future - wind, solar, etc. - we still need a way to deal with the huge amounts of carbon dioxide emissions that are already in the air today. Carbon sequestration is the only way to do that, meaning that what we really need is a multifaceted approach to fighting global warming that includes support of both renewable energy and sequestration projects, as well as a massive effort to become more energy efficient in our own lives and businesses.

Carbonfund.org's portfolio of projects has always reflected the need to hit the problem from multiple angles. The different project types also give people the choice: reduce current energy use (energy efficiency), reduce the need for future energy use (renewable energy) or reduce carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere (reforestation).


Photo by Russell Simon: Planters working to reforest 1,100 acres in the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge.

The Tensas River Reforestation Project, Part I

I'm back from my trip to Louisiana to visit our Tensas River Reforestation Project. Needless to say, it was extremely rewarding to see the support from us and from our partners actually making a difference out there in the fight against global warming.

In the coming days and weeks I'll be posting more photos as well as some videos from the trip. For now, here's a photo of the planters doing their thing: 750,000 trees on 1,100 acres in 5 days. They're tree-planting machines!

You can also read more about our reforestation projects and see the map of the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge.

Coming To You Live (Well, Recorded) From Nicaragua

Through the magic of the moving image comes:
Carbonfund.org
in
A Visit to the Return to Forest Project.

Scene 1: measuring carbon stocks. The workers are blocking out a plot 16 meters square, within which they will record the circumference of each tree more than 5 cm around. The mass of the aboveground (trunk, branches, leaves) and underground (roots) parts of these trees will be used in calculating how much carbon is stored per hectare. The measurements will be repeated all over the forest to arrive at conservative averages used to estimate how much carbon is sequestered. Before you can plant, you've got to measure.


Scene 2 stars Sarah Otterstrom, Executive Director of Paso Pacifico. She'll be visiting Carbonfund.org's office next week. This scene lacks subtitles and my Spanish is rudimentary at best, but I believe Sarah is asking about the different species of tree saplings and exclaiming at their beauty. And they are beautiful, aren't they?


In Scene 3 we reach the climax of our story: unloading thousands of saplings from the rainbow truck. Gotta get those baby trees to where they're needed most.


Stay tuned. There's more video where these came from, and we'll be debuting it over the next few weeks on our new Return to Forest Project page. Thanks for watching, and have a great weekend.

A CarbonFree Valentine's Day

Tomorrow we'll continue the sneak peek at the report from Paso Pacifico's Return to Forest Project with some exciting multimedia content, but today, exactly one week before the big V-Day, let's discuss environmentally responsible gifts for your own special carbon emitter while there's still plenty of time to get your order in.

What would the flower industry do without Valentine's Day? Last year, our friends at Flowerpetal.com estimated that 9000 metric tons of CO2 would be emitted by the importation and shipping of fresh flowers. Flowerpetal.com partnered with Carbonfund.org to calculate the impact of its own flower shipping and delivery through our Carbonfree™ shipping application, which was developed jointly with Carnegie Mellon University’s Green Design Institute. If roses are they key to your love's heart, why not order from Flowerpetal.com and ensure the only net emissions into our atmosphere are the lovely fragrances of red roses, Alstroemeria, pink Stargazer lilies, purple Matsumoto aster, and other flowers with long, sonorous names?

If flowers aren't the thing for your someone, take a look at our Small Business Partner JASCO Organics. They offer a wide range of organic beauty products, aromatherapy scents, and other romantic gifts-- and not only does JASCO offset manufacturing and distribution emissions, they also use Certified Organic materials and recycled packaging. An order of $50 or more gets you a free Euro-Tote.

OK, enough of that schmaltzy romantic stuff. Tomorrow, back to Nicaragua, and more saplings than you can shake a stick at (ha)!

(Photo by Flickr user judepics)

Baby Donkeys. Oxen. People.

On Monday I posted a photo of a truck carrying 4,000 trees at Paso Pacifico's Return to Forest project in Nicaragua, one of the reforestation projects in Carbonfund.org's portfolio. But trucks don't go all the way to where these trees need to be planted.

So how do you get from down here...

















to up here?

Answer: Baby donkeys.

Just kidding.
Real Answer: Oxen...

















and people.















The labor on the project is, in accordance with the CCBS standards against which the project was designed, 100% local or as local as possible given the remoteness of some projects and limited local capacity for certain professional positions (donkey foals generally don't provide the most accurate carbon stock estimates). All workers receive a living wage, or much more than a living wage in some cases.

Stay tuned for more from Carbonfund.org's Return to Forest visit!

(Photos by Sean Carney for Carbonfund.org, except last photo by J. Paniagua for USAID)

Middle Of Nowhere, Louisiana, USA; (Otherwise Known As the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge)

Tree planting at the 1,100-acre Tensas River Valley reforestation project in Louisiana officially begins this week. The biologists tell us Louisiana is one of the best places in the world to plant trees if you want to capture and sequester carbon dioxide, so we've been excited about this project for a long time.

Tomorrow I'm flying out of Baltimore direct to Jackson, Mississippi, where I will rent a pickup truck and drive two hours west to the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge. Details of the 1,100-acre reforestation project are on our website. Details about the refuge itself can be found here.

The snazziest information about the project, though, can be found on Volkswagen's website. Much of the funding for the project is coming through our partnership with the automaker. VW is offsetting the first year of driving for every car it sold between Sept. 1, 2007 and Jan. 2nd, 2008-- just under 80,000 cars.

I'll be reporting more on the project when I get back next week. Until then, here's to not getting lost in central Louisiana.

Life In The Projects

Carbonfund.org, which is located in Silver Spring, MD, supports a number of carbon-reduction projects, none of which is located in Silver Spring, MD. (Silver Spring has many-- well, a few-- charms, but significant opportunities for, say, reforestation are not among them).

What that means is we have to travel to check up on our projects. This week, Russell is making the trek to Louisiana to visit the Tensas River Valley Reforestation Project. As a kind of preliminary to his report, I'll be posting some photos from a trip former Carbonfund.org staffer Sean made to Paso Pacifico's Return to Forest Project in Nicaragua.

The inaugural photo is of one of the colorful trucks used to haul trees-- in this case, about 4000 of the little guys-- up into the hills. As part of the project spec, Paso Pacifico measured every liter of fuel used by the trucks, calculated the emissions from burning that fuel, and subtracted the result from the total tons reduced by the project.

Look for more photos and a more detailed report on Sean's trip in the near future on our website.

(Photo by Sean Carney for Carbonfund.org)

"The State of Green Business" in 2008

Eco-business guru Joel Makower and GreenBiz.com have released a new report: "The State of Green Business 2008." This report aims to describe the bustling intersection of business and sustainability, to cut through the hype and analyze the thousands of announcements, technological developments, and breakthroughs that occurred in the past twelve months.

Their conclusion?

The state of green business is improving, slowly but surely, as companies both large and small learn the value of integrating environmental thinking into their operations in ways that align with core business strategy and bottom-line goals. Green business has shifted from a movement to a market. But there is much, much more to do.

We agree with this conclusion, and are proud to be part of the solution. Voluntary carbon offsets are mentioned briefly as a developing market, and if there's one bone I'd pick with the report, it's that not enough credit is given to independent third-party certifications. When Conservation International, the Nature Conservancy, and other widely recognized and respected environmental organizations come together behind a strict, comprehensive standard, it's time to give credit where credit is due.

Have a great weekend!