I'm experimenting with posting music-related entries in my last.fm journal, and that's where you'll find the entry referred to in the title here.
The plan is to splice the blogs together, so that this becomes a hub for everything, but there's little telling when that'll actually happen so in the meantime I'll post links here when I've blogged there.
You can find this entry at: http://www.last.fm/user/jystewart/journal/2006/01/30/67793/
When I was looking for options to offset our airmiles I noted and commented on a significant difference between the carbon production estimates, and the cost to offset it, from NativeEnergy and Carbonfund.org.
I remarked on this in the comments box when placing my order with NativeEnergy and today received the following response from Lauren Aldrich at NativeEnergy, which she has said I'm welcome to post here:
Thank you for asking about the CO2 emissions and price discrepancies between NativeEnergy and Carbonfund. It's important to us that our customers understand why these differences exist, because there are good reasons.
Regarding CO2 emissions from air travel: Carbonfund assumes a conservative emissions scenario, using a rate of 0.6393 lbs of CO2 per passenger mile. This industry-accepted rate describes the emissions caused by 'short haul' flights - flights up to 281 miles long - that are energy intensive because of the amount of altitude gained compared to the cross-country distance. NativeEnergy allows customers to place their flight mileage into the 'short haul', 'medium haul', or 'long haul' categories. It seems that you placed your miles in the 'long haul' category - for flights greater than 994 mi long - and our calculator applied the correct emissions factor of 0.3903 lbs of CO2 per passenger mile. Long distance travel is less energy intensive per mile than short haul travel. This explains why your NativeEnergy travel footprint was almost half of what Carbonfund calculated. (Note also that Carbonfund footprints are given in metric tons, while NativeEnergy uses short tons. 1 metric ton = 1.1023 short tons).
Regarding the price difference: Carbonfund buys low-cost offsets from existing renewable energy projects and from the Chicago Climate Exchange, a carbon trading super-market. On occasion we purchase offsets from existing projects, and offer them at rates comparable to and often lower than Carbonfund. In the normal course, however, we choose what we and our customers believe are much higher value offsets, for which we pay a much higher price, and so must charge a higher price. So when you buy offsets from NativeEnergy, you do pay more, but you also get more — instead of just subsidizing existing projects owned and operated by large corporations, you get to help a Native American tribe or a family farm to build a truly new renewable energy project, creating environmental benefits while helping build sustainable economies in communities in need. We are proud that our customers value the difference.
I hope I have answered your questions sufficiently, and again, thanks for asking.
Tags: environment | carbon offset | carbon offsetting | carbonfund | nativeenergy
One of the best features of freelance work is that when Kari has to travel for work, I can often tag along. Last year that took us to Colorado, and this year to Arizona, for a couple of days just outside Phoenix and a couple more in beautiful Sedona.
Our photos are at flickr.
I took a look at Responsible Travel, following a link from Year Of Living Generously. Their system claims to take into account all the emissions of planes (not just CO2) and they offer a very simple calculator for working out the offsets required for a particular journey. Unfortunately it doesn't work quite so well for our needs, as we are attempting to offset 50,000 miles (3 rountrips to the UK for Kari, 4 for me, plus 2 flights back from New York and 2 rountrips to Colorado), and there's no obvious place to insert the number of miles should you already know it.
Renewable Choice Energy is the option selected by the Whole Foods grocery store chain (the largest purchase of carbon offset credits ever, see this entry at worthwhile magazine's blog). Their 'residential' options provides monthly programs at rates of $5, $10 and $15 per month dependent on size of house. Unfortunately there is no obvious way to sign up to offset a specific number of tons or airmiles without doing a few independent calculations and gathering a bit more information than is available on their site.
Carbonfund.org, the people we used for the household emissions, offer an air travel option and calculate our 50,000 miles as equivalent to 36.22 tons of CO2, over twice our household emissions. By contrast, Native Energy calculates the same number of miles as 14.4 tons, but charges more than twice as much per ton for offsets ($12.00 vs. $5.50).
In the interests of spreading our money around a number of organizations, I opted to go with Native Energy, but a discrepancy in emissions calculations of that size certainly merits further investigation, and I'll be trying to do that before the next time I try to offset our air miles.
Tags: environment | carbon offset | carbon offsetting | carbonfund | Whole Foods | Rewewable Choice Energy | Native Energy
Next up for carbon offsetting is our household heating and electricity usage. For some of the past year we were on a renewable energy program with Consumer's Energy but they changed their arrangements and we haven't quite gotten around to re-enrolling, so I decided to try and offset 50% of our electricity usage (which totalled 3944kwhs in 2005) and 100% of our natural gas usage (907 therms): a total of 16.44 tons of carbon.
Today's organization of choice is carbonfund.org. They're pretty visible in google and their homepage provides a convenient calculator. Use of the calculator became even easier when I discovered that DTE Energy—our gas supplier—provide a quick summary of annual usage. Consumer's Energy don't make it quite that easy but our old bills were accessible and addition isn't too hard.
I was pleased to see that the site offers the option of setting up a recurring monthly payment. I opted to pay a lump sum, but monthly payment options certainly make it more accessible. They also make it clear that the money invested with them for carbon offsetting is a charitable donation and so tax deductible for those in the US.
Tags: environment | carbon offset | carbon offsetting | carbonfund
I'm not really one for resolutions, but the New Year does seem an apt time to clear away a few of those tasks I've been meaning to get to for a while. First up is carbon offsetting: the practice of investing in projects that attempt to reduce the planet's production of environmentally harmful carbon products by an amount equivalent to that you generate.
It's been difficult to find appraisals of the quality of the various services out there, so I've decided to split our investment a few ways to give us a chance to try out each of the services and with the hope that at least some of the money will be well invested.
Today I signed up for a Terrapass, a scheme designed for car owners. You enter the details of your car and your average mileage and it will tell you how much carbon you're generating, recommending a membership level to offset that.
While we try to keep our car usage as low as possible, we still hit somewhere around the US average of 12,000 miles per year mainly as a result of semi-regular trips down to Nashville and over to Chicago. We'll keep trying to find ways to reduce that, but while we do it's good to know we're helping someone, somewhere try and offset the 8,500 lbs of carbon dioxide we're inflicting on the planet.
At present, you can only sign up for terrapass with a lump-sum up-front payment. We're in a position where that's not a problem, but in order to attract people from a wider range of economic situations it would be good if there were ways to pay monthly, or perhaps to buy credit for a certain number of miles. It's also not clear whether it takes the production of the car—which could perhaps be spread over an average car lifespan—into account but it's a simple programme and they appear to be investing in good projects.
Tags: environment | carbon offset | carbon offsetting | terrapass
