In reference to Nick's post below, yes offsetting one's own CO2 emissions by purchasing Certified Emission Reduction (CER) credits on the open market is ridiculously easy at the moment, considering the average American is responsible for around 20 tons of CO2 emissions per year (CDIAC, multiply by 44/12 to convert tons carbon to tons CO2) and that credits are selling for around $5 per ton. Also theoretically all of the credits being sold go through a fairly rigorous certification process. It looks like CarbonFund is using a combination of wind power projects and a biomass digester. I offset my car's emissions (and my family's cars' emissions as Christmas presents) using
http://www.drivinggreen.com
and am now a proud owner of an "I emit no gas" t-shirt. Driving Green is a service from AgCert, a company that captures methane from manure ponds using large tents. Because methane is 20 times more efficient than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere, they can then sell CER credits corresponding to the methane they trap. AgCert is traded on the London stock exchange as AGC and as AGCTF on the Nasdaq OTCBB (sorry I didn't post this 4 months ago). Also, under the Kyoto agreement EU countries that miss their targets
will pay penalties of 40 EURO/ton for the first three years and then
100 EURO/ton after that, so with the normal caveats that I am not an
economist it seems clear to me that as long as international agreements
hold the demand will outstrip supply for years to come and that the
prices will inevitably go up.
Now, if everyone in the industrialized world simply had to pay $100 per year to avert climate change, this would be a nice easy solution. Unfortunately the capacity to prevent or capture CO2 (or methane) emissions is very small relative to our total emissions, so this is not possible. Of course people are working very hard at coming up with new ways to do this (if you have any great ideas let me know) but the magnitude of the problem is immense. Think of all the infrastructure it takes to get a gallon of gasoline to your car (wells, tankers, pipelines, trucks) and then think about the fact that every gallon of gasoline you burn produces 19 pounds of CO2 - if you could somehow get it into solid form (as dry ice), what would you do with it all? You'd either need to build up an equally extensive infrastructure to dispose of it or we'd have great skiing in L.A. Of course the fact that CO2 comes out as a gas makes the problem even harder to deal with both because you first have to capture it and because people don't think much about something they can't see.
Nonetheless, buying CER credits now provides a direct incentive for companies to expand this capacity, for example by putting in wind farms instead of coal plants whenever possible, so I strongly endorse Nick's suggestion:
Question: any thoughts on how/whether or not to incorporate the purchase of carbon-trading rights into the game? Maybe make our usage-reduction goal 10% and our emissions-reduction goal 100% (not 30%) - i.e. at the end of the year, participants purchase carbon-trading rights to render themselves carbon neutral (should only cost ~ $100 - 150 per individual, worst case, I suspect).
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