Offseting Carbon Emissions

“Carbon offsets are an excellent way to manage emissions that we cannot easily or otherwise reduce ourselves”

Professor Diana Liverman
Director, Oxford University Environmental Change Institute

Offsetting your carbon emissions means paying someone to balance your production of CO2 by reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by an amount equivalent to your activities.

Climate Care (CC) is one company that offer offsets for such driving, flying, and homes. Their web-calculators will calculate CO2 Tonnes emitted by a given activity. All you have to do is enter a few parameters. A round-trip flight from London Heathrow to NY JFK emits 1.54 Tonnes of CO₂ — a cost of only £11.55.   A petrol fueled car that gets 35 mpg emits 3.00 Tonnes of CO₂ every 10,000 miles; the cost to offset is be £22.50.
How exactly do they offset your emmsions?

Where is this carbon sequestered?

Easy!  CC invests in projects across the world that reduce the amount of carbon that include renewable energy, energy efficiency, and forest restoration.  A third party does an assessment of the CO2 emissions pre- and post-project in order to calculate the reduction in CO2 acquired.

One such project is Lighting up Education in Kazakhstan, where CC provids the cost of compact fluorescent lamps that are being distributed to school children during workshops on climate change.  These lightbulbs are 5 x more efficient; the official report on the actual CO2 reduction is being done by The Climate Change Coordination Centre of Kazakhstan.  Other projects can be found here.

The company also offers services for Businesses — the Guardian Newspaper offsets some 700 tonnes of CO2 annually — and a range of gifts — £110.00 for offset emissions covering 150 guests and the couples honeymoon flights, equivalent to 14.5 tones of CO2.