This is an expense that an organization can incur to “offset” their carbon emissions. If a company outputs 100 tons of CO2 each year, they can give money to organizations that theoretically enable the removal of that same amount of C02, thus “making up for their sins,” in some sense.
Carbon offsetting can be voluntary or required by regulations.
It’s not an exact science, because how can you determine if an organization effectively removes carbon from the air?
Wikipedia lists these types of projects as examples of carbon offsetting:
- Renewable energy
- Methane collection and combustion
- Energy efficiency
- Destruction of industrial pollutants
The problem is that these are all wildly indirect. It’s easy to measure how much CO2 an organization outputs, but how do you measure how much an organization or project negates? Also, how do you verify that this is additional removal, meaning removal that would not have otherwise taken place if the offset had not been purchased?
Some organizations object to the idea that organizations can just “pay to pollute,” essentially.
Greenpeace:
[…] carbon offsetting transport falls very short. Paying lip service to action, and piecemeal measures are not an option. It’s time for strong words to be matched with strong action.
The Institute for Applied Ecology:
Overall, our results suggest that 85% of the projects covered in this analysis and 73% of the potential 2013-2020 Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) supply have a low likelihood that emission reductions are additional and are not over-estimated.
Several organizations offer carbon offset purchasing. For instance, at Carbonfund.org you can purchase an offset for a married couple for $600, or they have a calculator for your small business to determine what your output is. To be clear, voluntarily “purchasing” an offset from an organization like this is just a charitable donation to an organization that will distribute the money to other organization who claim to help the environment.
What business are looking for is to be able to announce that they are “carbon neutral,” which means they have purchased the same amount of carbon offsets as they output in CO2. They are essentially purchasing the right to make a claim that they care about the environment.
The costs of carbon offsets vary, and there’s an extensive secondary market where you can purchase a carbon offset from someone who purchased it but doesn’t “use” it by outputting the CO2.
Ecosystem Marketplace did a survey on the average costs in the voluntary carbon offset market, and found these prices:
- Renewable energy projects cost $1.40 to offset 1 ton of CO2 output
- Forestry and land use projects: $4.30
- Waste disposal: $2.50
To put it in perspective, one semi truck operating 120,000 miles a year outputs 223 tons of CO2, meaning the cost of offset it would be anywhere from $300 to $1,000. Walmart currently operates 6,121 such trucks (Walmart Trucking Fleet Fact Sheet (PDF)). To voluntarily offset their entire fleet would cost between $1.8 million to $6.1 million.