Word: offsetting
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Treeflights.com is just one beneficiary of a growing environmental subindustry known as "carbon offsetting." Typically, one of this new breed of companies first calculates the amount of greenhouse gases an individual or business generates by flying, driving or heating and lighting a home or office. Customers then voluntarily pay that firm to invest in projects that will cut carbon emissions by an equal amount. (Energy-hungry Americans generate about 20 tons of CO2 per capita per year; Britons, about half that). So for anything between $4 and $40 to offset the equivalent of one ton of CO2, a consumer...
...what's good for the carbon offsetting business good for the environment? That's open to debate. Voluntary carbon offsetting is an unlicensed industry, and without a common regulator to police the projects and companies pledging to shrink emissions, offset providers have come up with a raft of competing rules and practices, not all of them with the credibility customers expect...
...just in planting trees, but also in ensuring they thrive. But others may not be so diligent and disease, fire and logging can all shorten a tree's life. "You can never be sure the atmosphere sees the benefit," says Dietrich Brockhagen, managing director of atmosfair, a Berlin-based offset provider that avoids reforestation schemes...
While some firms, like PC maker Dell, are still willing to sponsor major reforestation initiatives, others aren't taking chances. HSBC steered clear of trees when it successfully offset 170,000 tons of its emissions for the last quarter of 2005 through investments in renewable energy projects. "However many trees we planted around the world, we could not keep up [with global CO2 output]", says Francis Sullivan, the bank's environment adviser. HSBC looks, he says, for more efficient uses of its money, such as its investment in a wind farm in New Zealand. Tree planting, Sullivan says...
...explains Brad Birky, who opened SAME with his wife, Libby, in October. Customers who have no money are encouraged to exchange an hour of service - sweep, wash the dishes, weed the organic garden - for a meal. Likewise, guests who have money are encouraged to leave a little extra to offset the meals of those who have less to give. "We're a hand up, not a handout," says One World owner Denise Cerreta, who prides herself on the fact that everyone can afford a meal at her caf?...