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The following is a guest post by Jen Boynton:

So, you’ve decided to take some responsibility for your carbon footprint and buy some carbon offsets to account for all your unavoidable driving and flying emissions. Congratulations on taking some responsibility for the massive situation we call “the climate crisis” Now you are wondering, which retailers are the most reliable? And how do you tell? It’s a complicated world out there, but I hope to make things a bit easier for you by recommending a few sellers and projects that are better than most and telling you why.

Before we get into the nitty gritty, let’s make sure we’re all clear on what a carbon offset actually is. In its most simplified form, a carbon offset is a commitment that 1 metric ton of C02 equivalent has been prevented from entering the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. Whew. Feel free to read that again if you need to. The offset can come about through dozens of different means like tradable credits from the Chicago Climate Exchange, or they can take the form of different carbon reduction projects which can be categorized into three main types: renewable (emissions free) energy generation, energy efficiency, and sequestration. We’ll discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each type of project a bit later. 

In addition to the type of offset, we also need to be concerned about quality. We want to buy offsets that are verifiable (the project actually happened), additional (it wouldn’t have happened without your money), leakage-free (the carbon you’ve sequestered isn’t going anywhere), permanent (those trees you paid for won’t be cut down and turned into paper napkins), and not double-counted-(the offset was sold only to you). By purchasing offsets that meet these criteria, you have the best chance of making sure that your purchase has the intended effect of ensuring that that green house gas does not make it into the atmosphere. I tell you all of this because I believe that in a Wild West marketplace, it’s very important to be an informed consumer.

But that’s just the background. You’ll be dealing with the retailers, folks who will sell a variety of offsets from different types of projects, so let’s focus on what you need to look for from your offset seller. The first thing you need to watch out for is that the offsets are verified through a third party verifier like Green-e, the Gold Standard or the  Voluntary Carbon Standard. These verification schemes will make sure that the quality of the offset is up to par. If you are curious about why those are my picks, take a look at a post I recently wrote on voluntary carbon offset regulation for TriplePundit.com.

As for where you can go to purchase your offsets, there are a variety of other retailers who sell a portfolio of projects verified by some or all of the verifiers I mentioned. My favorite catch all site for offset sellers is EcoBusinessLinks.com. They regularly update with new sellers, the types of projects they are offering, who verifies them, and the price at which they are selling. This site is an easy way to pick out retailers who have projects from the most trustworthy third party verifiers.

I also wanted to specifically call out the offset retailers that are verified through the Green-e certification, because Green-e is my personal favorite, due to the fact that my beloved UCS weighed in on the verification criteria.

Green-e verifies offsets that are sold by: 3 Degrees, Bonneville Energy Foundation, and Community Energy, which are all companies I would recommend buying from. 3 Degrees has some renewables and methane capture offsets that are verified through Green-e, while Bonneville and Community Energy offsets are renewable energy based. What is the difference between these types of offsets, pray tell? I am so glad you asked! These are two of the most common offset projects out there, and they are the two types of offset projects I would recommend buying if you are going to make an offsets purchase. Here’s how they work: (story continues, click on the link below…)

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Some 230 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions can be avoided between now and 2050 - bringing atmospheric CO2 concentrations down 20 parts per million - if carbon capture and storage (CCS) development is pursued aggressively and put into use, according to Shell International’s Unconventional and Enhanced Oil Recovery team. 

While the resources devoted to developing renewable energy resources will continue to grow, hydrocarbon fuels will continue be the world’s predominant fuel and power sources during coming decades, according to Shell’s Blueprint and Scramble global energy scenarios for the 21st century. 

The pressing need to better manage and reduce overall carbon footprints across societies and countries around the world that rely on hydrocarbons - be it oil, gas or coal - for transportation, power generation and heating and cooling makes CCS an all the more attractive and feasible technology, but only if more is done in short order in the way of multi-stakeholder demonstration and pilot tests, carbon prices increase and CCS projects qualify for carbon emissions reduction credits - such as those issued as part of the EU ETS and UN-Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) - and the necessary legal and regulatory parts are put into place, according to John Barry and his team, who spoke with more than 70 participants from around the world June 19 during the second installment of Shell Dialogues.   Convincing the broad public that  CCS  can be used widely  yet safely and responsibly will be one of  the  biggest and most important hurdles, he added.

Shell’s Enhanced Oil and Uncoventional Energy team took the webcast podium and devoted about an hour to outlining and discussing Shell’s own, as well as broader public-private partnerships, aimed at kick-starting CCS project development.  “While it won’t solve society’s energy and environmental problems on its own, it will allow us to continue to make use of the abundant fossil fuels that are needed in the energy mix and provide a bridge to the eventual longer term lower carbon energy future,” Barry, vice president in charge of the Shell team, said.

Here’s a link to the webcast video and transcripts of Shell Dialgoues 2 in its entirety.

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About two-thirds of Iowa has been declared a disaster area as a result of this year’s flooding.  Reminiscent of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, residents along the Mississippi River are living under curfews and have to pass through check points to see their damaged homes.

Failed government policies are responsible, according to Friends of the Earth, which has launched a Web-driven public campaign to effect changes to national flood and river management policies.  

Given the increasing frequency and intensity of precipitation and flooding in the Mississippi River basin and delta, there’s an urgent need to rethink and re-orient federal government policies.  “The Army Corps of Engineers, along with the rest of the federal government, can no longer waste money and endanger people with futile attempts to overpower Mother Nature - especially as we come to expect 100-year floods every decade.  It is imperative that we stop playing the proverbial fool and start building our lives on secure ground,” FoE asserts.

Need for a Radical Change in Policy, Practice

Specifically, FoE is calling for changes in the longstanding means and methods the federal government, through the Army Corps of Engineers, uses to cope with high precipitation and flooding along the nation’s major waterways.  A shift away from large-scale structural engineering solutions and towards wetland restoration is urgently needed, changes that scientists have been advocating for decades now.

An even more radical change in property development, as well as national flood policy and measures to minimize damage, is necessary if repeats of this and previous years’ flooding are to be avoided however, according to the FoE.  Future building and rebuilding in the Midwest should be set back from waterways and other flood-prone areas, FoE advises. 

Despite spending of billions of tax dollars, federal government and US Army Corps of Engineer efforts to minimize flooding and damages along the Mississippi are failing.  What’s more, expert advice that might lead to more enlightened policy and programs is being ignored, according to the FoE. 

Don’t rebuild in high-hazard flood-prone zones like coastlines and river deltas was expert counsel in a 1966 report to Congress by the Task Force on Federal Flood Control Policy, and was reiterated in the 1973 Report of the National Water Commission, both of which found that flood damages were increasing despite enormous flood control expenditures. 

Wetlands: How to Restore What’s Been Destroyed?

Not surprisingly, ecological research has shown that nature’s has its own, effective ways of coping with high-intensity storms and floods – wetlands.  Unfortunately, private developers with support from tax dollars have wiped most of them out. 

As much as 95% of Iowa’s and Illinois’s wetlands have been destroyed, which contributes to the damages caused by floods, FoE notes.

Restoring wetlands and river ecosystems, typically a secondary consideration in reconstruction efforts to date, would provide a relatively low-cost, low environmental impact means of providing a flood and storm buffer in the Mississippi and other river basins and should move up to the front line of national flood management policy and efforts, it asserts.  

“Both panels [the researchers who carried out the 1966 and 1973 studies] recommended that more attention be paid to relocation out of flood zones and called for greater emphasis on non-engineering solutions.  There is a growing body of evidence that healthy wetlands, in-tact dune systems and other natural ecosystems reduce storm and flood damage, but far too many tax dollars have been spent to destroy these natural systems to facilitate more development,” FoE notes on its web site. 

Increased Precipitation and a Warming Climate

“No single weather event can be attributed to global warming, and it is impossible to say that the recent heavy rains in the Midwest are caused by the climate crisis, but it is clear that in the aggregate, humans’ continued pumping of massive quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is causing more extreme weather,” the FoE wrote as part of its public appeal and political action campaign.

It cites the following as evidence of link between increasing frequency and intensity of floods and precipitation in particular regions:

- A 1995 analysis from the National Climatic Data Center showed extreme weather events in the United States were already increasing in ‘statistically significant’ ways;

- In 2002, scientists called increased precipitation ‘an expected outcome of climate change’ that ‘may cause losses of U.S. corn production to double over the next 30 years’;

- In 2004, an article published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology found that, "Over the contiguous U.S. precipitation, temperature, stream flow, heavy and very heavy precipitation … have increased during the 20th century";

- Also in 2004, scientific models predicted ‘greater increases in extreme precipitation’ due to global warming.

Political change is vital and possible, FoE urges, noting that the president appoints the Army Corps of Engineers’ leaders and is charged with ensuring that they have access to the knowledge, expertise and resources required to enact more enlightened flood control and waterway management policies.

As part of its more immediate political action campaign, it has organized a Congressional petition, which can be accessed via this link.

-Andrew Burger

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In a procedural vote of 74 to 14 the Senate began the process on Monday of bringing the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act to a full floor debate.

It seems a foregone conclusion that the bill will not pass this year, but in the spirit of the deliberative process, it will at least make everyone take a stand on the issue.

One of the principal objections to the bill is the purported “economic damage” it will cause, with opponents using hot-button terms like “high energy prices” and “rising taxes”.

Despite the enormous cost his administration has projected years and decades into the future, George Bush advised congress to be

very careful about running up enormous costs to future generations”

Even if the bill could manage to get past the senate this year, president Bush has vowed to veto it if it does.

Proponents of the bill are encouraged that any debate about climate change is progressing in the Senate, seeing it as an essential first step to the essential role government must play in dealing with climate change and a new energy economy;

We may not get it done this year, but if not we start next year just a few steps from the finish line

David Doniger, director of climate policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said, acknowledging the current debate is just the start of a long struggle getting climate change policy enacted.  

As Carl Pope writes today in the Huffington Post, one job the Senate has before it is shifting its perception of the energy issue. There will always be idealogues lost in their own insistence that facts don’t count for much and thus see no problem in making up their own (like James Inhofe claiming the bill will bring gas prices to $8 a gallon when even the Bush administration says at worst it will raise gas prices 50 cents a gallon by 2020). But Congress generally fits policy around energy producers instead of consumers. The vast engine of American wealth and prosperity is driven by businesses that consume energy, not produce it. I’m not interested in buying a barrel of oil or a lump of coal. I need what they provide – energy.

There is no doubt that the economics of running an oil company in 2050 will be substantially different than it is now. With that reality comes hard changes for producers and consumers alike. But the reality of our energy and climate future will not go away by ignoring it or striving to conserve the status quo while denying the true costs in so doing. The risk is far too great to do nothing. 

“The times, they are a-changin”. The task of the Senate is to embrace that fact and look into the future instead of clinging to the past.

The Lieberman-Warner act may be flawed, it may hold little chance of passing into law without substantial tweaking or full scale revision – and certainly not until there is a new president – but this is where it starts as we begin the essential transformation of the global energy economy.

The whole world is watching.

Sources and Further Reading:
New York Times
National Journal

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Last Thursday, the House Ways and Means Committee voted 25–12  to approve the Energy and Tax Extenders Act of 2008 (HR6049) worth $54 billion in tax breaks including the expansion of the refundable child tax credit and breaks for education and small business expenses. The bill also includes an extension of the Production Tax Credit for wind energy and other other tax breaks for research and development in solar and other alternative energy technologies. A breakdown of the energy-related tax breaks in the bill include:

• A six-year extension in the investment tax credit for solar energy
• A three-year extension of the production tax credit for biomass, geothermal, hydro-power, landfill gas, and solid waste
• A one-year production tax credit extension for wind energy
• Incentives for non-corn based (cellulosic) ethanol and biodiesel
• Incentives for companies that produce energy efficient products like plug-in hybrids
• Incentives for energy conservation in both commercial and residential buildings
• Tax credit bonds to help state and local governments make energy conservation investments in public infrastructure and invest in research

Late last year congress extended renewable energy tax credits one year, then set to expire on December 31^st 2007.

With the realities of oil now trading at over $127 a barrel as of this writing, renewable energy sources show increasing economic viability, without even considering any long term sustainability and climate issues inherent with continued and increasing dependence on diminishing sources of oil.

As seen in the recent study from the Department of Energy that we wrote about last Friday, wind and other renewable energy sources stand poised to help transition the nation into a new energy economy, providing new and sustainable sources of energy, industrial growth, and hundreds of thousands of jobs.

One stumbling block to this is the halting nature of the renewable energy tax credit. The U.S. government directly subsidizes (pdf) the oil industry (by some estimates to the tune of $61 billion). The cost of gas and oil, while rising substantially, has never reflected its true cost by externalizing the cost of dependence, environmental degradation, source depletion, and climate impact (how does $480 a barrel sound?).

In the meantime, renewable energy has been hampered by inconsistent and half-hearted support from the federal government. Last year represented only the second time the production tax credit was extended before allowing it to expire. Between 1999 and 2004, the PTC was left to expire, promoting an on-again off-again atmosphere, dampening progress in renewable energy development – particularly wind.

Alternative energy projects take years to develop, plan, permit, and build. Investment in these projects depend on the 1.9 cent per kilowatt/hour tax incentive to help bring the potential of wind and other renewable to fruition. When that tax incentives disappear, so do billions of dollars in investment and ten of thousands of jobs. Poof!

Tuesday May 20th is a “National Day of Action” for renewable energy, calling on clean energy advocacy groups, environmental organization, and companies with a stake and interest in developing clean energy to call their representative in Washington in support of the Energy and Tax Extenders Act of 2008.

The bill also provides tax breaks for coal gasification projects and other “clean coal” technologies such as carbon capture and sequestration.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hopes to bring the legislation to a full vote before the House for the Memorial Day recess.   

 

Sources and Further Reading
Union of Concerned Scientists
EndOilAid.org
Renewable Energy World
Grist
Solar Nation

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