|
****JavaScript based drop down DHTML menu generated by NavStudio. (OpenCube Inc. - http://www.opencube.com)****
|
9.
Recommendations & Company Ratings Summary
& Ratings Of All 13 Companies (table) As illustrated in this site, there are a number of ways in which carbon offset companies can be compared, reflecting the diversity in approaches to addressing issues of climate change. TCI has chosen the following criteria as most important in evaluating an offset company: Calculator: The air travel emissions calculator should be accurate, include a multiplier for radiative forcing and account for flight variables. Project Type: Project portfolios should have little or no bio-sequestration projects; rather they should be mainly or entirely renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. Project Location: The advantages and disadvantages of projects in developing nations depend very much on how projects are designed and implemented. Because there are also major concerns with projects implemented domestically, we do not recommend one over the other. Project/Offset Quality: Projects should ideally be additional, permanent, account for leakage and contribute to the long-term goal of a carbon free, highly energy efficient economy. They should be planned and implemented with excellent standards and verification. Additional benefits such as capacity building or protected biodiversity are a plus. High standard and verification requirements such as the Gold Standard and the Voluntary Gold Standard help maximize the benefits of projects implemented in non-Annex 1 countries. Transparency: The company should clearly state all their procedures, verification schemes, financial arrangements and partnerships. We
chose to divide the evaluated companies into three groups: Within each category, the companies are listed alphabetically. Click here for Table 8: Summary & Ratings Of All 13 Companies 1. Recommended (atmosfair, climate friendly, myclimate, NativeEnergy) atmosfair atmosfair has an excellent air travel emissions calculator and detailed information on the underlying assumptions. atmosfair has excellent on-line documentation of its projects. All of its projects have to meet the Gold Standard. atmosfair’s project portfolio includes four renewable energy and energy efficiency projects planned and/or implemented in India, Thailand, Brazil and South Africa. atmosfair does not invest in domestic projects or sequestrations projects. All projects are third party verified by TÜV . All verification reports can be downloaded directly from the website. The projects in India (large scale solar cookers) and the project in Thailand (sewage treatment plant at palm oil factory to reduce methane emissions) are currently in the operations phase. The projects in Brazil and South Africa are still in the planning stage and it is unclear when and if they will be realized. atmosfair is unusually honest in its project descriptions, as the following example of the project in Brazil shows: “At present the validation of the project according to the GoldStandard is unsure. The partner for this project, the local NGO South-SouthNorth, announced in November 2005 to get the approval for the Gold Standard. But the ongoing delays casts doubt of that plan. The newly patented technology is still tested, thus the local impacts on the environment cannot be determined finally. Taking into account previous delays atmosfair only sees a limited chance of success for this project. No funds have been paid for the project so far since atmosfair retains the right to only pay for the contracted volume of emission reductions when the project fulfills the Gold Standard.” (http://www.atmosfair.de/index.php?id=174&L=3, last accessed: 11/21/2006) atmosfair is one of the more expensive companies we evaluated. They charge $17.30 per ton of CO2 offset. The high prices might be due to the fact that all their projects are implemented within the Kyoto Mechanisms. Despite the high cost, we give this company a high rating for its excellent documentation, good projects and strict verification procedures. climate friendly is a for-profit company that offers offsets to individuals and businesses. This Australian organization was founded in 2004. climate friendly has an excellent air travel emissions calculator. climate friendly charges $14.50 per ton of CO2 offset. climate friendly’s project portfolio consists of two wind power projects. Both sites were built after 2001: •
The 52.5MW Challicum Hills wind farm in Victoria was completed in 2003. Although climate friendly currently has only wind power in their portfolio they are seeking new renewable energy projects including wind, solar electric (PV), solar thermal, micro hydro (low-impact), geothermal, ecologically sound biomass and biogas. They do not fund bio-sequestration, geo-sequestration, or landfill gas projects. All projects are accredited through two standards: The Gold Standard and Green Power accreditation. Although climate friendly is currently a small company, their high standards, transparency and excellent carbon calculator make them a good choice for offsetting air travel emissions. myclimate
myclimate - The Climate Protection Partnership was started in 2002 as an international non-profit venture at the Eidgenoessischen Technischen Hochschule (ETH) in Switzerland. It sells offsets to businesses, organizations and individuals. To sell carbon offsets in the US myclimate has partnered with Sustainable Travel International, a non-profit organization that specializes in ecotourism and sustainable travel programs. The air travel emissions calculator on the Swiss site is very good. The calculator on the US site is acceptable but emissions are likely underestimated. myclimate offers CDM projects and VER projects in its portfolio and does not support sequestration projects. For individual customers, myclimate offers two different project portfolios: Portfolio
Sustainability Portfolio
Balance The offsets from myclimate are quite expensive at $18.00 (US site) $27.40 (CH site). Although it is not made explicit on the websites, the US site quotes offsets for “Portfolio Balance”, the Swiss site quotes offsets for “Portfolio Sustainability". myclimate carbon offset projects are certified by independent organizations. Depending on the project size and type, validation may take place either through CDM accredited certification institutes such as the SGS, TÜV and DNV or by a board of experts from Swiss universities. All myclimate projects, CDM and VER, have to adhere to the Gold Standard. The project descriptions on the website are very good. They all indicate how much the project is expected to offset and if it is a CDM or VER project. Unfortunately, project description information is hard to find on the US site. Despite the high price of their offsets, myclimate’s high project standards, its transparency and good calculator makes it an excellent choice for offsetting air travel emissions. NativeEnergy NativeEnergy
has a very good air travel emissions calculator that uses a factor of
two to account for full radiative forcing. NativeEnergy
charges $12 per ton of CO2 offset. NativeEnergy has a very extensive website that gives answers to many of the technical questions: e.g. what is additionality or what is the difference between a REC and a carbon offset. They also have short project descriptions of eight of their already implemented projects and 4 currently planned projects (see http://www.NativeEnergy.com/projects.html, last accessed 12/14/06.) NativeEnergy clearly distinguishes between RECs, carbon credits and future credits and explains the issue of additionality to their customers:
They state the additionality benefits of their futures (which they call “help build Recs”) but also the risks associated with buying credits that will be created in the future and therefore need to be estimated. On the other hand, it is not clear how they choose their projects or how the carbon offsets are verified. They do not list a third party verification process or company. NativeEnergy's strict distinction between type and quality of offset is laudable. We would like to see more transparency in terms of financing and project verification. We recommend NativeEnergy as a provider of voluntary carbon offsets. 2. Recommended with Reservation (CarbonCounter.org, Carbonfund.org, The CarbonNeutral Company, Climate Care, Offsetters, TerraPass) Carbonfund.org
(last edited for revision 1.2) Carbonfund.org’s air travel emissions calculator does not account for full radiative forcing and underestimates emissions from air travel. Their price of $5.50 per ton of CO2 offset is very low. Carbonfund.org invests in renewable energy and energy efficiency as well as sequestration projects. All the projects are located in the US. Carbonfund.org’s renewable energy offsets are primarily certified by either Green-e or ERT (non-wind related renewable energy offsets). Carbonfund.org purchases its Energy Efficiency VERs from Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). The sequestration carbon offset credits are audited by ERT. ERT also audit Carbonfund’s offset results to insure that purchase and retirement of offsets matches the contributions they receive. Carbonfund.org has good on-line documentation of many of its projects. Some of the certification documents can be downloaded directly from the website. We feel that Carbonfund.org makes a good effort to be transparent, efficient and competitively priced. Yet we are concerned about the quality of the offsets that Carbonfund.org sells: namely RECs (no guaranteed additionality), CCX offsets (overabundancy) and sequestration offsets. We recommend Carbonfund.org to offset air travel emissions with the above mentioned reservations. CarbonCounter.org CarbonCounter.org is a collaborative non-profit project started in 2002 by The Climate Trust and The Mercy Corporation to offers offsets to individuals. The Climate Trust provides offsets to power plants, regulators, businesses and individuals and Mercy Corps is an international relief and development agency. At the time of this study, CarbonCounter.org’s emissions calculator underestimated the emissions from air travel. And they did not list any of their sources on the underlying assumptions. Yet they have since overhauled their website. They now use for a multiplier of 2 to account for radiative forcing and have a list with detailed information about their calculator assumption. Their price is $12 per ton of CO2 offset. CarbonCounter.org has overhauled its website and now has detailed information on many of the projects. Additional information can be found on The Climate Trust’s website:
Climate Trust invests in domestic and international efficiency, renewable energy and sequestration projects. According to their 2-page project standards summary available on their website: “The Trust requires state-of-the-art monitoring and verification of its offset projects.” The Climate Trust does not use any outside certifiers. They do state that they use third-party verification of all their projects, although no information on that is available on their current site. All of their projects produce VERs. They do not sell carbon credits that originated as REC because of additionality concerns. They are currently working on a document that spells out their additionality guidelines. The details are not yet publicly available. For a discussion on how some of their projects might have double counting issues, please see section 3.2 Climate Trust is one of the largest offset businesses. Although we cannot comment on their main carbon and consulting projects, we recommend CarbonCounter.org for offsetting individual air travel emissions with the above mentioned reservations. The
CarbonNeutral Company This UK for-profit company, originally known as Future Forests, was founded in 1997 focusing on providing carbon credits generated from forestry projects. The company has expanded its services and now offers offsets from a variety of projects (not exclusively forestry). It also offers marketing and consulting services. From December 2004 through June 2006 TCNC sold 378,423 tonnes of CO2. About 93% of their sales are through corporate clients and about 7% of their sales come from individual consumers. During that period about 70% of their offsets came from 'technology-based' projects (energy efficiency, renewable energy and methane mitigation) and 25% from afforestation and reforestation projects. (Source: KPMG’s verification report accessed on 3/24/07 from http://www.carbonneutral.com/pages/carbonstrategy.asp.) TCNC’s emissions calculator underestimates the emissions from airtravel. Their price is $18.40 per ton of CO2 offset. (This price includes 17.5% UK VAT). The CarbonNeutral Company invests in renewable energy, energy efficiency, methane sequestration and forestry projects in developed as well as developing nations (e.g. US, Germany, India, Mexico, etc.). One page PDF document summaries are available on their webpage. Some issues remain about double counting of projects that are implemented in Annex 1 countries. This is a problem that many offsets companies in Annex 1 countries with Kyoto obligations face: clients demand projects that are locally implemented but until now, there is no mechanism in place to retire these VERs so that there are not also counted in the country’s national inventory (see section 3.2). TCNC is quite aware of this issue and tries to address it as best as possible:
Until recently, TCNC has invested in projects outside the Kyoto Mechanisms - which generate Verified Emissions Reductions (VER's). The company has now added Certified Emissions Reductions (CER's) to their portfolio. For their VERs they have developed their own quality standards (see http://www.carbonneutral.com/pages/carbonstrategy.asp for ‘The CarbonNeutral Protocol’.) They also sell offsets from projects that were implemented under the Voluntary Carbon Standard version 1. The CarbonNeutral
Company is a large consulting, marketing and offset business. Although
we cannot comment on their other carbon and consulting projects, we recommend
them for offsetting individual air travel emissions with the above mentioned
reservations. Climate
Care Climate Care’s air travel emissions calculator does use a factor of 2 to account for full radiative forcing and yet in our examples, their calculator underestimated emissions from air travel. The price per tone of CO2 offset is of $12.60. In 2005, 80% of Climate Care’s offsets came from energy projects and 20% from sequestration projects. All projects are implemented in developing countries. Climate Care explicitly states that this is to avoid double counting emissions reductions in Annex 1 countries. Climate Care does not clearly state which standards and verifications they employ. They mention that a baseline report is written by a third party for each project. On their webpage and in their 2005 annual report, we find the following statements:
Although they contributed to the development of the voluntary Gold Standard, they do not currently offer Gold Standard certified offsets, but expect to do so in the future. All their listed projects tend to be small scale and decentralized. According to Climate Care’s 2005 annual report:
It is true that the regulatory burden is larger for CDM projects than for projects that produce VERs. As pointed out earlier VER producing projects, even if they are very small, can still be implemented adhering to the Gold Standard principles, especially since the release of the Voluntary Gold Standard in spring of 2006. Smaller decentralized projects in developing countries are very difficult to plan, implement and supervise. We would therefore argue that with such projects it is especially important that additional verification (such as required with the Gold Standard) takes place. We recommend Climate Care for offsetting individual air travel emissions with the above mentioned reservations. Offsetters Offsetters air travel calculator underestimates the carbon emissions. The price per ton of CO2 offset is approximately $13. Projects funded by offsets purchased through Offsetters are provided in collaboration with Climate Care, reviewed earlier. It is unclear if Offsetters offsets are produced with Gold Standard projects. On the webpage they state Offsetters supports the Gold Standard yet since Climate Care does not currently use the Gold Standard, we assume that is true for Offsetter projects also. We recommend Offsetters for offsetting individual air travel emissions with the reservations mentioned for Climate Care. TerraPass
(last edited for revision 1.2) TerraPass’ air travel emissions calculator does not account for full radiative forcing and underestimates emissions from air travel. Their price of $10 per ton of CO2 offset is relatively low. TerraPass funds renewable energy and energy efficiency projects that produce a combination of RECs and CFIs from CCX. All projects are implemented in the US. On their webpage, TerraPass lists eight projects: Three wind facilities, three biomass projects and two energy efficiency projects. TerraPass does not purchase bundled CFIs from CCX. Instead, they support specific projects, structure those contracts, and then take them to the CCX to register the trade. Such transaction are known as bilateral contracts. TerraPass comments:
We agree that such direct project contract can potentially help to increase transparency and quality of product. Because of additionality concerns with RECs that we stated earlier, and because of concerns that have been raised about the methodologies that CCX uses for some of their project evaluations and baseline calculations we recommend TerraPass for offsetting individual air travel emissions with reservations. 3. Currently Not Recommended (Better World Club, Cleanairpass, Solar Electric Light Fund) Better
World Club We welcome this kind of one-stop-shopping, where customers can purchase offsets at the same time they buy their airline tickets. More travelers are likely to buy offsets when procedures are simplified in that way. (Yet the BWC offsite webpage is hard to locate on their website. It is not accessible from the homepage and also not listed on their site map.) Better World Club does not have a carbon calculator on its site but has a link to http://www.earthfuture.com/climate/calculators/ which lists many available calculators. Although we applaud the mission of BWC and also welcome any organization that sensitizes the public about their carbon footprint, we recommend using offset companies that are more accurate in their calculations and their emissions offset. For emissions offsets to gain credibility and to be verifiable, they have to be calculated accurately and offset as exactly as possible. We do not recommend the Better World Club for buying offsets. Solar
Electric Light Fund SELF’s
website does not have its own carbon calculators, however, they have link
to www.earthfuture.com/climate/calculators
with a list of about 25 calculators. SELF’s
project portfolio is composed of solar energy projects which include electrification
of public buildings, including health clinics, schools, houses of worship
and streetlights, household electrification and solar water pumps for
efficient irrigation. For each project, the partner institution is clearly
identified. There are no third party verifications for the projects SELF invests in. SELF states that it maintains a certain level of internal standards including ensuring social, economic and environmentally sound project outcomes. But it is unclear what their standards are. Neither Better World Club nor SELF are offset companies in the strict sense. They were included in this report to show the diversity of offset programs that exist. Although we applaud the creativity of these two organizations and also welcome any organization that sensitizes the public about their carbon footprint, we recommend using offset companies that are more accurate in their calculations and more rigorous in ensuring additionality and permanence of their projects. We do not recommend SELF for buying offsets. Cleanairpass Cleanairpass does not have an air travel calculator because of their focus on vehicle emissions. The price per ton of CO2 offset is approximately $8. Currently Cleanairpass does not seem to have concrete projects. According
to its webpage: “We intend to source emission offsets from local sources as they become available and anticipate the initiation of a Canadian emissions trading system late 2006. Currently Cleanairpass is in the process of purchasing our first emission offsets. Be one of the first to get a Cleanairpass! Return to this page to review the projects Cleanairpass supports.” (https://www.Cleanairpass.com/cap/offsetSources.jsf, last accessed 11/27/06) Since Cleanairpass is a very young company that does not have any concrete projects listed and since they do not have an air travel carbon calculator, we do not recommend the Cleanairpass for buying offsets to offset air travel. 10.
Conclusions Moreover, while it reduces carbon emissions at the margins, when just a few enlightened people choose to offset their carbon footprint, it clearly would not be possible to offset all air travel related carbon emissions, either now or much less in the future, given the rapid growth or air travel. There is much validity to the argument that offsetting simply helps us assuage our guilt, whilst we continue to fail to change out lifestyles towards patterns that are more truly sustainable. Avoiding having to fly to far-away places is still the most effective way to reduce one’s personal air travel emissions (3). Voluntary approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions do not capture sufficient emission sources. No voluntary approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions should be allowed to delay or replace a mandatory federal cap on carbon emissions or a worldwide tax on jet fuel. Reducing travel miles and living a less energy-intense lifestyle in general – e.g. living in an apartment close to work and using public transportation –and voting officials into office who enact legislation that effectively addresses the threats of climate change will ultimately be more important than buying carbon offsets. On the other hand, carbon offsetting can genuinely reduce emissions. Even more importantly, it can help provide funds now to kick start the development of low carbon technologies, which will be vital in the more fundamental transition to low carbon societies. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Alastair Thompson, Charlie Heaps, Michael Lazarus, Sivan Karta and William Moomaw for their comments and suggestions on this paper. 1 500 PPM GmbH currently collaborates with myclimate. 2 Also see Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change, Privatisation and Power Published in April 2006. The book can be downloaded at www.dhf.uu.se/press_release_carbon.html. 3 The argument that the air plane will fly anyway, has only limited validity, as the effects of Y2K and 9/11 on the air travel industry showed. For a complete list of references and footnotes, please download the pdf of the report. |
||