The Kyoto Card

Carbon credits were officially created back in 1997 during the Kyoto Protocol as a measure devised to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions and fight climate change. Every carbon credit represents one tonne of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. Unfortunately, they have become one of the latest ways to scam people out of thousands of dollars while contributing nothing to the environmental clean up.

Oddly enough, there are no laws against selling someone bogus carbon credits.

There are dozens of places online where we can contribute to making the air a little cleaner, but there are signs we can look for to make sure the company is a legitimate organization.

The easiest way to check the validity of an organization is to see if they’re in The Gold Standard Marketplace. The Gold Standard is a non-profit company governed by Swiss Law and funded by public and private funds. Founded in 2003, they offer a quality label to CDM/JI and voluntary offset projects. With a focus on renewable energy and energy efficient projects, consumers and corporations purchasing carbon credits can rest assured that their money is going towards projects with a much higher ROI than simply another carbon sink. Although carbon sinks play an important role in trapping greenhouse gas emissions, we will not solve our problem by planting more trees.

Carbon Sinks Only Go So Far

Trees, soils, oceans and the atmosphere all store carbon. Like the water cycle, carbon is in constant motion moving among various stages over time. Forests typically absorb more carbon than they emit making them “sinks”, while at other times they can emit enough carbon to choke the local atmosphere for hundreds of miles. When you look at it from a distance, forests are just as effective at trapping carbon as our fossil fuels. For millions of years we had billions of tonnes of carbon trapped underground in the form of coal, oil and natural gas. Then, in the space of a single century, we managed to put quite a bit of it back into action.

So, while carbon sinks would certainly take care of some of the problem, they cannot be considered permanent storage. It also allows us to continue abusing the planet in the name of “progress”.

The Kyoto Loophole

For every tonne of carbon stored in a sink, the Kyoto Protocol allows for the release of an additional tonne of carbon released from fossil fuels. This is nothing more than substitution, and gives us a license to pollute rather than find ways to solve our problems. On top of this, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and biosphere will continue to increase. This is very important to realize because, unlike the carbon in fossil fuels, carbon stored in the biosphere can be released very easily. Forest fires, insect outbreaks, decay, logging, land use changes … there are too many ways for the carbon we’re trapping to escape. The extensive damaged done in 2007 during the California forest fires proves that regardless of a nations technological prowess, we’re essentially powerless to stop forest fires.

Carbon sinks are are likely to contribute to increasing the long-term atmospheric concentrations of CO2, which is the exact opposite of the intended effect. The dangerous avoidance of emission cuts now is only increasing the threats of climate change to future generations.

This isn’t to say that all carbon sink projects are a waste of money, as it couldn’t be further from the truth. Carbon sinks not only do their part by trapping some of what we release, but they provide natural habitats for wildlife and provide oxygen for everything on the Earth. We just need to keep in mind that we shouldn’t be limiting our credits to tree-planting alone.

Finding The Best Credits

Finding the best carbon credit sources can be a challenge. Several of the countries that have signed on to the Kyoto Protocol should have a list of approved credit suppliers on their government websites. However, after doing quite a bit of digging, it’s been next to impossible to find related to the Kyoto Protocol or carbon credits on any federal site outside of Europe.

That said, they are out there. In future posts I plan on reviewing several of the online sources for carbon credits and determining who is real, and who is just taking our money. Hopefully, with enough awareness of the companies that scam us, we can invest our money wisely.

Do you buy carbon credits? Do you feel this is something we should all do, or just corporations? I’d be interested to know your thoughts on the matter.