Daniel Englander 01 08 08, 6:30 PM

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A Pound of Carbon. No More, No Less.

Regulatory scrutiny is beginning to fall over the $100 million a year carbon offset market. On January 8th the FTC held its first public hearing to investigate advertising and deceptive practices in the sale of carbon offsets to consumers. These include “double counting� of emissions reductions and investing in projects with little or no mitigation impact. The carbon offset market is effectively unregulated, with a handful of third parties buying, selling, and investing carbon offsets on behalf of consumers and companies alike. While some carbon offsets are effective, the vast majority are having a minimal or non existent impact on global emissions reduction, and primarily serve to provide a green veneer for crunchy consumers and corporations seeking to burnish their image during a slumping economy.

Fraud, however, is not the real crime here. Companies like Dell, General Electric, and Delta Airlines, as well as the roughly 30 carbon offset intermediaries, are tapping into consumer desire to invest in carbon mitigation strategies. This is misplaced capital that could be going towards building renewable energy capacity, developing new green technologies, or buying energy efficient home appliances. Ultimately, environmentalism needs to realize its now a market, not a social movement, and we’re not playing with Monopoly money. The decisions companies and consumers make have real consequences, and the invested capital represents real opportunities, not charitable donations.

Nicholas Hall 12 31 07, 7:19 AM

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Is Greentech Really a Market?

This might seem like kind of a self-defeating question, or self-destroying, but who cares. If this whole thing tanks we’re off to Mexico; sayonara suckers.

But the question is actually not self-defeating, because it’s answer is ‘Yes’, though it remains worth asking because greentech isn’t any kind of traditional market. It’s a practice; it’s an idea; it’s a tactic. Greentech is in one form a non-taxonomic label that can be applied to pretty much any existing technology, a modifier to some pre-existing machine. There are some technologies that are specifically green: solar, wind, wave, and other types of power generation exist for no reason other than to minimize carbon fuels consumption and carbon exhaust expulsion.

Those aside, though, green or clean technologies not only are just modifiers to existing tech, but should be. Most agree that our short-term carbon impact could be best mitigated through greater efficiencies in existing systems. The required financial investment for alternate power sources to sufficiently reduce our carbon output may not be possible (politically, anyway) from the existing global economy. Beyond that, the required lead times for getting enough power online may be more than we have if we are to prevent a global tipping, not to mention more than most investors have if they’re to see returns. So greentech must become a strategy of modification, altering existing infrastructure with smaller increments of time and money spent. And in this way it is not a market like telecom or personal computers or web applications. Those following it are not united by common technology, jargon, and job prospects, but by an abstract belief in some combination of its importance and profitability.

That is the particular challenge of it as a market or a movement, that it’s members don’t have as much shared language as they did when they were in other markets—as they all recently were. There is the shared language of money, and perhaps of ideology, and maybe the word ‘carbon’, but that’s a thin frame upon which to build what should by all rights some day be the rapid successor to the information market of today, the new, green, industrial revolution.