Brad Ideas - Retail carbon credits for the car driver - Comments

Credits

brad — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 23:50:46 -0800

The credits for store purchases would be so cheap as to be pretty meaningless. At the pump or in the home heating and electric bill it would be a different story.

Of course in mandatory credit schemes, buying them is not an option, you can't burn the fuel at all without credits. Usually these get applied to the big vendors who then pass on the cost.

It's 113 gallons to a tonne of CO2, or 8.8kg per gallon. At the Euro price that's 10 cents per gallon ($11/tonne) and with a 20% markup that's closer to $2 on a 15 gallon ($50) fillup, which I could see people doing. Of course with so much demand the price would go up, as it should. And there would need to be more regulations to stop scamming by sellers.

Optional carbon credits at the pump and retail stores

micah — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 22:48:42 -0800

Okay, so Delta airlines is allowing individuals the option to purchase credits to offset the carbon emissions from their flights. So far it has be popular. Why not expand this into everyday life. Example: one gallon of gas results in the same amount of co2 regardless of the car that burns it right? then at the pump, instead of asking if I want to buy a car wash, ask if I want to offset the CO2 from my fill up today for X cost. In most cases it would be less than a dollar. The station can take a 20% markup (regulated) and the rest buys credits off the climate exchange. This would funnel tens of millions to green energy development. It also means that I can drive my hummer guilt free and dont need to find biofuels.

The same can be done at checkout counters of say wholefoods. Johnson and Johnson could easily calculate the carbon emmission released while making some shampoo. Give that info per item to the big box retailers, link it to the barcode. Then at the end of the purchase ask the customer if that want to offset the carbon for an additional X dollars. It will be added immediately at the point of purchase, retailer takes their 20% and the average cost would be under a buck. I would do it everytime for say 30 cents each visit. Why not? its just 30 cents...

Please post feedback! Thanks mlandis@charityh2o.org

No, it should be ourcarbonnation.com

brad — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:54:00 -0800

My point was you should not just correct the URL here. Instead, just make "ourcarbonnation.com" do a redirectperm to www.whatever so people can type in both.

And switch to a better hosting company, that's the quick way to make it fast. Then, improve the code and go to a cheaper hosting company when you're done.

Woops yes it should

Our Carbon Nation — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:49:18 -0800

Woops yes it should obviously be http://www.ourcarbonnation.com. Thank you for taking the time to look at the site. We are aware the site can be a little slow and are in the process of resolving this issue.

Regards
Our Carbon Nation

Good idea

brad — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 11:05:58 -0800

But you don't have anything at ourcarbonnation.com without a www in front, so you should fix that. And it's a very slow, over-animated web site, and produces PDFs at the end which makes no sense. Did I mention slow?

The Carbon Offset Directory

Our Carbon Nation — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 06:30:30 -0800

If you wish to review the different Offset Providers have a look at http://ourcarbonnation.com
We hold information on price per tonne, administration costs and how projects are verified. We are constantly striving to increase transparency in the offset market and have the support of over 40 providers. Have a look and let us know what you think.
Our Carbon Nation Team

Great Post

Matt — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 09:23:11 -0700

Thanks for reviewing the different sites. I was going to buy some carbon credits but wasn't sure where the best place to buy them was. This post helped.

So how much is it costing me

Anonymous — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 06:23:58 -0700

So how much is it costing me to exhale? Are you gonna want a credit for my dog?
Hm, a religion that worships the earth and expects penence.
Adolf would have been giddy over this one.

The retail offsets

brad — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:27:56 -0700

Are priced way above the wholesale. The wholesale are underpriced but the retail are overpriced.

There are questions on the mercury in CFLs right now, so they might not be the best pathway here.

An alternate offset measured in CFLs

Aaron — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 21:36:38 -0700

I have given away 90 of the 307 CFLs to offset my CO2.

Here is the idea... check my logic.

http://baranoff.typepad.com/cheaper_electric/2007/05/my_version_of_c.htm...

Aaron

Thanks for your comments!

PotentialHybridOwner — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:53:22 -0700

Thanks for your comments!

Hybrid car credits

brad — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:40:28 -0700

That would, in theory, be possible. Pollution trading credit systems work by having some verifiable way that the seller has reduced emissions, or in legal regimes, that the seller is emitting below some legally set level for a particular activity. In order to work, it must be verifiable, it must be real, and it must also be economical to perform this verification.

That's bad news for car drivers. Since driving a hybrid car is fairly trivial on the emissions reduction scale. 103 gallons of gas produces 1 ton of CO2 which trades for about $4 in US credit markets. So a hybrid driver getting 45mpg over a gas car driver getting 25mpg going 15,000 miles saves 2.6 tons of CO2, or just over $10 of CO2 credit. At European prices it's closer to $30.

But none of these numbers, sadly, are high enough to pay the costs of administering such a program and doing good enforcement and verification.

For 100 vehicles it is a different story, and I don't see why the exchanges would not be willing to do something here. If there were many thousands of people with 100 vechicles, that is. Even $1000 for 100 vehicles wouldn't begin to pay the legal fees to make something like this work if you were the only person asking, I would guess.

Hybrid cars that get up to twice the mileage are good, but the truth is there are far more effective, larger scale ways to reduce pollution right now.

A more likely situation is for a vendor of low mileage cars, like Toyota, to sell credits for what they do. They do it at a scale which can afford the paperwork and enforcement is very simple since they already have all the accounting in place. So instead your Hybrid costs $50 less rather than each individual owner trying to sell credits.

One of the hard parts about pollution trading is figuring out what's a real reduction, the kind we want to subsidize. On one hand, somebody who takes transit is doing ever more to fight pollution, but unless they switch from a car to transit they didn't reduce the total.

One approach is to allocate each person an equal share somehow, and those who want to drive hummers pay more and those who don't commute at all get credits, but the bureaucracy of that is also large.

What if I were to own Hybrid Car(s)?

PotentialHybridOwner — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:01:42 -0700

Brad,

Your blog is about buying carbon credits if you want to offset the carbon emissions from your car. Lets says, however, that I owe 100 hybrid cars (this is just a hypothetical situation). Would these institutions that buy and sell carbon credits pay me for the reduced carbon emissions that my 100 hybrid car provide? Can I get verification of reduced emissions for my hybrids and then sell them to companies willing to buy credits?
what are your thoughts?

Thanks!

Re: CO2

Bradley — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:49:07 -0700

You're forgetting about air intake. Your emissions are composed not only of the fuel you burn, but also of the air you use to burn the fuel. I don't know whether that's enough to get you up to 11 metric tons, it seems sketchy.

Personally I think the whole idea of carbon credits is pure shit. The idea that you can pay somebody else off so you can pollute all you want, doesn't change the fact that you're polluting. It's like dumping mercury into the Missouri River but paying GE to stop putting mercury in lightbulbs. It effects a zero net change in environmental pollution, but it's still rediculous.

Chemistry

Malik — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 19:07:10 -0800

Gasoline contains many hydrocarbons, but for example if you take Octane and burn it completely, you get:

2(C8H18) + 25(O2) > 16(CO2) + 18 (H20)

So for every molecule of octane you burn, you produce 8 molecules of CO2. This is ideal, not counting Nitrogen in the air and all the range of carbon chains in gasoline, but you get the idea.

Retail carbon credits for the car driver

brad — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 14:59:29 -0800

You may have heard of the idea of pollution credit trading. I’ve been pointed to two firms that are selling CO2 credits on the retail level for individuals, to offset the output from driving a car, heating a house etc.

I’ll get into the details on how it works a bit below, but if you have a car like mine that is putting out 5 metric tons of CO2 each year, you can for a low price (about $50, which includes a whopping markup) pay a factory somewhere to cut their own output by 5 tons, meaning that net, you are causing zero emissions. Which means you are reducing total emissions by a lot more than you would by switching to a Prius, and you are doing it at a vastly lower cost. (This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t drive a Prius, it just means this is a lot more effective.)

Normally pollution credits are traded only by the big boys, trading contracts with hundreds or thousands of tonnes of emissions. The retail firms are letting small players get in the game.

This is a fabulous idea, in theory at least, and also a great, if sneaky gift idea. After all, if you buy the gift of not polluting for your loved one all they get is a bumper sticker and a good feeling. At least it’s better than giving to The Human Fund in their name.

Here’s the catch. I went and priced the credits, and while www.certifiedcleancar.com wanted $50 to credit my car, the actual price of credits on the Chicago Climate Exchange is about $2.16 per tonne of CO2, or about $8 for my actual output as they calculated it. One expects some markup, of course, and even some profit for the company selling the retail credits, but this is nuts. I called the other company, Terrapass and got reasonably frank answers. First of all, they claim they invest more in wind power and other truly non-polluting forms of energy more than they just buy carbon credits. Secondly, this is still a small volume thing, and most of the costs are not the credits, but the $20,000 or so to become a member of the exchange, or so I was told. And of course, in small volumes, administrative costs can swamp the real costs.

Another outfit I found is carbonfund.org which is non-profit and cheaper. In some sense since people buy these out of guilt rather than compulsion (they were meant to be forced on polluters to give money to non polluters and make a market) non-profit might make sense, but they are also supposed to be a real market.

Still, if I pay $50, I would love for my $50 to mostly go to reducing pollution, not mostly to administration. Usually when exchanges are expensive there are members who will trade for you at much more modest markups. The folks at Terrapass said they were not yet profitable at the current prices.

And it is such a good idea. Read below for more on pollution credits.