What does it mean when something claims to be carbon neutral?
ClimateBiz expert Dr. Mark C. Trexler tackles your questions on managing climate risk. Read More
Mark: Carbon-neutrality shows up under a variety of names. It is based around the use of offsets to effectively neutralize the GHG impacts of an activity, product, or service.
The concept is a great one, and we’ve worked with Stonyfield Farm, Shaklee, and others to promote it. And it’s becoming more popular, with a range of companies, universities, and large events declaring themselves carbon-neutral. The Democratic National Convention last fall was touted as carbon neutral, as were the Salt Lake City Olympics. Next year’s Super Bowl will be carbon-neutral. And there are numerous other examples.
Many organizations are ready to help you become carbon-neutral — American Forests, the Climate Neutral Network, Native Energy, TerraPass, the Climate Trust, and several brokers, to name just a few. And several travel agencies will sell you offsets along with your airline ticket!
There is one small problem to be aware of. To really result in carbon-neutrality, the offsets must result from new emissions reductions. If the offsets are coming from projects and activities that would have happened anyway, you’re simply moving the reductions (and money) around. And unfortunately, there’s no easy way to distinguish between “new” and “business-as-usual” reductions. This is why project “additionality” has been such a big issue under the Kyoto Protocol.
One thing that is clear is that figuring out how to use small amounts of money from the sale of carbon-neutral certificates to bring about truly new projects and offsets is a huge challenge. And if we’re planting trees with the money (a popular carbon-neutral strategy), it can be decades before the offsets actually exist. Do consumers understand that?
Some excellent organizations are working in this area, and good offset projects are being funded. The majority of carbon-neutral claims being made today, however, are simply not true, primarily because the money being spent to become carbon-neutral is not resulting in truly new emissions reductions. Even if your money is actually flowing to projects and activities that we might all agree are good, in most cases you’re really making a donation rather than making yourself carbon-neutral.
One can argue that what the carbon-neutrality market is really trying to do is raise public awareness, and that hopefully new reductions will result as participation and funding levels increase over time. But that’s not how carbon-neutrality is commonly portrayed, and it’s definitely a caveat emptor (“buyer beware”) market out there.
——
Dr. Mark C. Trexler has more than 25 years of energy and environmental experience, and has focused on global climate change since joining the World Resources Institute in 1988. He is now president of Trexler Climate + Energy Services, which provides strategic, market, and project services to clients around the world.
Got a question for our climate expert? Email Editor@ClimateBiz.com.
