Pembina Institute & The David Suzuki Foundation Publish Carbon Offset Buyers Guide

The burgeoning trade in voluntary carbon offsets is still a strange idea for the majority of regular consumers. Even the most hardcore environmental warriors might be intimidated by the abstraction of a carbon offset market versus the more direct and immediately measurable effects of limiting one's own environmental impact, and granted, they're absolutely right to say the more important goal is to limit one's carbon production before it ever hits the ozone.

But once consumers get passed the "icky" stage and dive headfirst into the carbon offsets market, they run up against a more familiar and much more difficult to solve problem: which carbon offsets vendor to choose! There are dozens of them, and as The David Suzuki Foundation & Pembina have shown in their carbon offset buyer's guide, not all of them are created equal.

Pembina & The David Suzuki Foundation are both Canadian non-profit think-tanks whose stated goals are to arm the public with the knowledge and tools to live ecologically sustainable lifestyles. With this in mind, they've produced a guide to carbon offsets trading that is useful for every tier of the market, from the large businesses and corporations looking to add some green cred on top to the regular folks like you and I riding the bus and bicycling to work at the bottom. They polled 20 carbon offset vendors on six factors: additionality (new growth in renewable energy versus work on previously existing infrastructure), auditing, unique ownership (presumably to prevent any sort of sinister conflict-of-interest scenarios like the double-selling of an unretired offset), permanance, vendor transparency and public education.

The survey produced some interesting results. The top rated carbon offset vendors were all companies involved with renewable energy and energy efficiency, while the lowest ranked worked on reforestation, which appears to confirm the notion that reforestation lies at the low-end of the spectrum of true carbon offsetting. But the really startling data came in the form of stark zeroes in the auditing column for two of the vendors polled, indicating that their offsetting claims could just as well be illegitimate. Food for thought in an unregulated market ripe for scams.

Ultimately, the most important data in the survey isn't the side-by-side comparisons of offset brokers or the lists of questions to ask a vendor before cutting a check. The most useful advice it can give is near the front page:

Before purchasing carbon offsets, first reduce your own carbon footprint as much as possible. We all need to make changes at work and at home to achieve the global emission reductions needed to solve the problem of climate change.