Questions to ask before you offset

Budget Travel Online gives advice on choosing carbon offset programs before you travel.  Of course, our favorite is Drive Neutral/Live Neutral (because they sponsor us).  Below the fold are the 4 questions Budget Travel Online recommends asking before choosing your offset program.

How are donations used?

Only give money to organizations that will disclose the details of the projects they invest in, the percentage of funds that goes to those projects (versus regular business costs), and their status as a nonprofit (or not). They should also reveal how they calculate offsets -- some factor in plane type, seat class and other details, while others are less precise.

Are results guaranteed?

Delta Air Lines made news recently by becoming the first U.S. carrier to offer carbon offsets on its Web site. The airline gives passengers the option of donating a flat $5.50 (for any domestic round trip) or $11 (for international trips) to its partner The Conservation Fund. Most of that money is used to plant trees, however, which is less than ideal.

According to Brendan Bell, the Sierra Club Global Warming and Energy Program's representative in Washington, D.C., organizations that invest in renewable energy (like solar, geo-thermal and wind) have a definite, measurable impact and are therefore a better bet than companies focused on reforestation -- because the results of planting trees are difficult to verify. The Conservation Fund, which since 2000 has planted more than nine million trees that'll reportedly capture nearly 13 million tons of CO2, obviously disagrees; for more info, see conservationfund.org.

Is there a seal of approval?

The fledgling carbon-offset industry is largely unregulated, so before you give any organization money, find out if an objective, trustworthy source vouches for it. Created under the auspices of the World Wildlife Fund, the Gold Standard is the strictest and best-vetted system of verifying carbon-offset projects. Outfits that meet the standard usually mention the fact prominently and display the official seal on their Web sites. If an organization's projects aren't approved by the Gold Standard, find out if another trustworthy third party has verified the quality.

Do you have a pet cause?

As with all giving, you should give to an organization that's important to you. Some offset outfits allow people to steer donations one way or another. Carbonfund.org, which has begun a partnership with Orbitz, lets donors direct their money to renewable energy, reforestation, energy-efficiency projects or some combination thereof. Other outfits are attractive because they focus on certain initiatives -- NativeEnergy, for instance, helps Native American farmers. By all means, support your favorite cause: Just be aware that environmental impact varies widely.

Comments

[dWj]

The great thing about internalizing costs is that it keeps us honest when revealing our preferences; I would rather forego this activity than bear the cost of its carbon footprint, but not this one. To the extent everyone complies vis-a-vis their direct emissions, the costs of higher-order products reflect all the costs incurred by the various producers in making them. If ethanol requires more energy than it produces, it remains uneconomical with costs internalized, so long as the subsidy is dropped. And so on.

For voluntary offsets, some of this gets weaker. No doubt the discipline of actually paying the cost when you emit carbon dioxide can mitigate the human tendency to lie to oneself, but so long as one has a dollar price attached to the activity, one can by and large assess on one's own whether the internal benefits exceed that cost; presumably whatever might otherwise cause one to contribute to the carbon offset program would also compel one to avoid activities that weren't worth it. The actual transfer of money, except insofar as it's disciplining the parties to the transaction to make sure the other resources are going from a lower-valued use to a higher-valued use, is essentially rent-seeking.

If the value I attach to carbon reduction, on the other hand, is higher than what someone is willing to sell it for, it makes sense for me to purchase this carbon reduction. I may be willing to give up some other resource -- some activity that has no carbon impact itself, but uses something else that one typically buys or sells -- in order to reduce carbon emissions by the amount that I can do by foregoing it. The extent to which I should sop up carbon is completely independent of my own carbon emission; it could be higher, and it could be lower, but if it's the same, that's entirely by coincidence. My interest in buying carbon credits is entirely unaffected by calculators that can tell me what my own carbon footprint is.

Here, then, (finally) is the problem I have with that Live Neutral website: it doesn't seem to have a way for me to just buy a couple of credits. I could pretend I still owned a car, or pretend I booked certain flights, and it would let me then buy however many credits I managed to pretend to consume, but what I'd much rather do is just buy maybe 5 tons worth -- 3 months emissions by the average American -- without figuring exactly what sort of fraud amounts to that. (I must be responsible for a couple of tons a year from residential electricity use. Nothing I could find on that website alludes to the existence of fossil-fuel--based electricity.)