Frequently Asked Questions
The carbon offsets you earn with Green Gas affiliates reduce your net impact on the environment.
To get a few different viewpoints, let’s start with some definitions.
Carbon offset is the result of any action specifically taken to remove from, or prevent the release of, carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in order to balance emissions taking place elsewhere.
(The Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting, And Verification Of Climate Change Mitigation Projects, Ch. 2, pg. 14. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Edward Vine and Jayant Sathaye, 1997.)
The act of reducing or avoiding GHG emissions in one place in order to “offset” GHG emissions occurring somewhere else.
After a GreenGas User buys a Flight via Green Flight or a product via Green Buy, Green Gas, on a quarterly basis, purchases Carbon Offsets from the Chicago Climate Exchange. At time of purchase, the property right to the offset is simultaneously donated.
This process allows you to take credit for the emissions reductions you earn and use it to cancel out part of your carbon footprint. It also ensures that your offsets will not be double-sold.
Carbon offsets are not tangible — you cannot hold them or touch them. Rather, they are a market-based mechanism for making new renewable energy projects possible. In order to get to a sustainable future, one in which our energy is produced by clean and renewable technologies, we need to collectively invest in that future; carbon offsets are an excellent way to do so.
A carbon footprint is an estimated total amount of greenhouse gases produced by a person’s daily activities, such as driving and heating a home, plus shared services (e.g., street lights).
It is expressed in Carbon Dioxide-equivalent units (CO2e), because there is more than one type of greenhouse gas and each greenhouse gas has a different climate impact relative to carbon dioxide.
What to do about your carbon footprint…
- Understand your climate impact by measuring your carbon footprint. Use a best-guess average, like 23 tons for the average U.S. resident, or calculate your own.
- Reduce your carbon footprint as much as you can. This means carpooling to work, installing Compact Fluorescent light bulbs, and doing other things that conserve energy.
- Offset what you can’t reduce.
Out goal is to reduce your Carbon Footprint
Renewable energy projects help the environment in two main ways:
- They produce low or zero carbon emissions
- They reduce the need for fossil fuel energy
When they generate electricity from the wind, sunlight, etc., renewable energy projects release very little or no greenhouse gases. This helps fight climate change.Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels helps more than the environment — it also reduces our dependence on oil from foreign sources.
Domestic flights
According to table 7 of the BTS June 2007 Airline Traffic Data regarding domestic flights, the average distance flown per passenger in miles is 869.8. If we use Clean Air-Cool Planet’s A Consumers’ Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers estimate of 1 ton CO2e per 2000 flight miles, this is 0.4349 tons per domestic flight. At Green Gas we offset .5 Tons per domestic FlightCars off the road for 1,900 miles
Clean Air-Cool Planet’s A Consumers’ Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers estimates 1 ton CO2e per 1,900 miles traveled in a mid-sized car.Home power, heating, and cooling
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Personal Emissions Calculator estimates 16,290 pounds CO2e for electricity and 11,000 pounds CO2e for natural gas for a household of two people over a year. This approximates to 13.6 tons per year or slightly more than 1 ton CO2e per month of running an average U.S. household.
A ton of CO2e is emitted when you…
- Drive 1,350 miles in a large sport utility vehicle.
- Drive 6,000 miles in a hybrid gasoline-electric car.
- Have your computer on for 10,600 hours.
A ton of CO2e is conserved when you…
- Run one 600 kW wind turbine for about half a day.
- Replace 2 refrigerators with the highest efficiency model (10-year life).
- Protect four acres of tropical rainforest from deforestation (but tree-planting does not create carbon offsets, because it is not permanent.)
(A Consumers’ Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers, pg. 5. Clean Air-Cool Planet, 2006.)
Offsets must be permanent so that carbon reductions are not invalidated by some unforeseen problem.
Source-side improvements such as wind farms, solar installations, and farm methane projects are built to provide carbon-free electricity for decades.
On the other hand, offsets generated through sink-side improvements (such as tree planting) are theoretically attractive yet problematic in execution. The academic literature remains undecided on an appropriate measurement and monitoring strategy, so precise quantification of environmental benefit remains elusive. This is further complicated by an inability to predict natural disasters (such as forest fires) and prevent other disruptive events (timber harvesting, for example) that could compromise the environmental benefit represented by the offsets.
By investing in source-side renewable energy projects via the Chicago Climate Exchange,Green Gas will ensure that the environmental benefits we purchase will be as permanent as current technology allows.
Green Gas users help finance the building of wind turbines and other renewable energy projects in order to retire a share of projects’ estimated lifetime CO2e reductions (a.k.a. carbon offsets). An independent Carbon Exchange, the Chicago Carbon Exchange, is the current exclusive carbon offset provider.
To count the carbon offsets against your carbon footprint, you need to make sure that they will be permanently retired. That’s why Green Gas donates Chicago Climate Exchange carbon offsets and therefore never trades or re-sell them.
The offsets that are bought using Green Gas products and Services are legal property rights, so to ensure that they have the intended positive environmental benefits, we make sure that your offsets are never sold to someone else later.