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1. Sign the card for Earth Day
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2. Making child's play out of clean energy
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3. TerraPass on TMZ!
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4. When does additionality matter? (Part 4)
Sign the card for Earth Day
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American Heritage magazine described the first Earth Day, in 1970, as "one of the most remarkable happenings in the history of democracy," because a spontaneous response from thousands of schools and local communities saw demonstrations and teach-ins that included over 20 million people.
With the re-awakening to environmental issues, Earth Day in the 21st century continues its relevance, although its participants can hardly be described as grassroots any longer. Next week Earth Day will again be celebrated on April 22. We've worked together with friends at Squidnote.com, an online greeting card company, to put together a card of environmental pledges, led off by one of our best spokespeople, Ed Begley, Jr.
Here are a few of the pledges we've seen so far:
- More walking and using public transport
- Bug my alderman each week to get recycling in my district
- Instead of buying things I don't need, I am going to make things myself by reusing what I already have
- I will carpool to work one day a week
- For my grandchildren's sake, I will think long and hard before I take my car if I can bike or walk
And the list goes on. You can read more at www.signthecard.com. We've had pledges from across the United States, from London, Paris and Colombia. We've had an SUV driver promising to sell his car and a hard-green environmentalist promising to install a gray-water system.
What's your Earth Day pledge? Visit www.signthecard.com to make a declaration. And then please pass the link around. I can't think of many better ways to spread the word about how easy it is to reduce our footprints than to tell others about what we're doing ourselves.
If you're not yet certain you want to do anything for Earth Day -- or perhaps you're not sure what you could do -- have a look at other people's suggestions and see if you're inspired to contribute your own.
If you do sign the card, feel free to let us know in comments below what your pledge is. Happy pledging -- and happy Earth Day! Wouldn't it be great to establish a grassroots movement of our own for Earth Day 2008?
Making child's play out of clean energy
Staff at TerraPass Towers have been busy looking around for new products to add to our popular green store. While Smart Strips, Kill A Watts and other energy-savers (many more to be announced soon) can be great ways of directly reducing your footprint, they're not the most, well, fun products on store shelves.
Recently we came across some great games and toys with educational footprint-reduction messages, and I'm happy to announce the first few are available at TerraPass today.
Risk and Monopoly fans should be excited to try Earthopoly ($24.95), a game where you dominate the world by looking after natural resources and charging people carbon credits for landing on them.
For the nerdier among us (I'll include myself here) the idea of building your own hydrogen fuel cell car is very cool. Now you can with the Fuel Cell Car kits (from $99.95) made by Thames and Kosmos. The more expensive one includes 30 experiments to help learn all about fuel cells, give your own presentations and generally become a complete fuel cell expert. Both sets include a fully working water-powered car.
TerraPass on TMZ!
This is three kinds of awesome: Ed Begley was cornered by a celebrity stalker outside LAX, and used the opportunity to plug TerraPass. Famous people, take note: paparazzi quickly scatter when you start delivering earnest sermons about carbon offsets into the camera. TerraPass is much cheaper than the lawsuit you'll face after you start throwing punches.
By all means, click the link, but a word of warning: if you're easily scandalized by bottom-feeding celebrity gossip sites, ready your hankie and smelling salts. The ads featuring "Tila Tequila" are about the most tasteful part of TMZ.
When does additionality matter? (Part 4)
This post is the slightly tardy conclusion of a series (see parts one, two, and three).
Let's wrap this up by shifting gears a bit. Additionality is central and essential part of the carbon offset market. Additionality is also, in the long term, probably not relevant to the energy efficiency market. The reason hinges on the difference between carbon offsets and carbon allowances. Both are often lumped together under the term "carbon credits," but they're different in important ways that are sometimes lost in discussions of cap-and-trade systems.
Some basic definitions are in order. Carbon allowances are those things that everyone is eager to auction off these days: pollution permits for greenhouse gas emissions. Under a cap-and-trade system, the government issues a fixed number of these permits, and every year the number drops. That's the cap, and as long as it covers a sufficiently large swath of the economy, it's difficult for polluters to evade. (New Yorkers can't, for example, buy electricity from China.)
Carbon offsets, on the other hand, are pollution permits generated from specific projects that exist outside the cap. For example, no matter how big a chunk of the economy the cap covers, it probably won't cover cow manure on small dairy farms. If you can demonstrate that you took specific measures to reign in a certain number of tons of dairy farm methane, you can use those emissions reductions to satisfy your obligations under a cap.
Additionality isn't an issue for allowances. The number of allowances is fixed, and that's that. They might get traded and passed around between polluters, their price might rise or fall, but they still represent a hard limit on the amount of carbon the economy produces. Additionality is a major issue for offsets. If any old project can serve as a source of offsets, polluters can easily sneak out of a cap.
This last point seems to bother a lot people. Indeed, it's a bit counterintuitive. Isn't a reduction a reduction? If company X emits 100 tons of CO2 one year and then 90 tons the next, why should we care about their motives? Let's just reward the reduction.
The problem here is that a massive number of emissions reductions and efficiency gains are happening all over the economy at any point in time, even as aggregate emissions go up. Check out the graph above. The carbon intensity of the California economy has plummeted since 1981, dropping by roughly 4 percent per year. There are, of course, lots of reasons this has happened, but clearly carbon offsets weren't a driving factor back in 1981. If you try to build a cap on top of this trend that drops total emissions by roughly 2 percent per year, as Lieberman-Warner does, non-additional offsets would let you easily fulfill that cap by cherry-picking all the efficiency gains that were occurring in the economy anyway. (Please note that you can't compare the 4 percent and the 2 percent figures directly -- they measure different things. The point is just that non-additional offsets will easily wash out a cap.)
Allowances to the rescue. Because allowances impose an economy-wide hard cap, no cherry-picking can take place. Additionality concerns go away. The difference between offsets and allowances is critical for energy efficiency measures like Sean Casten's co-generation projects. Once a cap is in place, allowances will privilege Sean's low-carbon energy by making it comparatively cheaper than dirty energy. The coal plant down the street has to buy lots of allowances to cover its emissions, a cost which eventually gets passed on to customers. The market tilts toward projects like Sean's that don't carry this allowance burden. Best of all, allowances don't come with any pesky additionality tests. Additionality, in a certain sense, is built into the cap.
Now, Sean has argued persuasively that the "stick-based" incentives provided by allowances aren't always enough to overcome various sources of inertia in the energy market that prevent -- at least in the short term -- good projects from moving forward. This is clearly a big problem, and I can imagine a number of policy prescriptions (such as set-asides -- freebie allowances for clean energy producers) that might help. But abolishing additionality isn't one of them, because additionality is, in this case, a red herring. The whole purpose of high-quality, additional offsets is to encourage carbon reductions in sectors of the economy not otherwise covered by a cap. The purpose of allowances is to force carbon reductions in the sectors that are covered. Getting rid of additionality would damage both mechanisms simultaneously.
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