To encourage potential customers to retire our credits, we will make matching retirements for the first 100 credits retired through Climafixit.  So let’s say you’re willing to spend ~$65 to buy 5 credits somewhere else and offset your 5 metric ton carbon footprint.  For $65 you can retire 10 CCX Ag Methane credits and we will retire an additional 10 on your behalf.  It is obviously better to retire 20 credits than 5.  If you feel better about buying a more expensive credit then you could just buy 5 of the CAR credits and still save $15.  We think this is a better service model for customers who are serious about carbon offsets and hope you agree.  We are committed to providing our customers with high-quality carbon credits at a great value.  Click here to go to our store.

The blog now seems to be up working properly and carbon credits can be retired through the Climafixit page.  At this time Paypal is the only payment option.  If you notice anything not working properly on the site, please leave a comment.  The site is a little lacking in content at the moment but due to an issue with our previous hosting provider (stay away from SilverRack), the first six months of content were lost.  With climate legislation being fairly dead in the water since Copenhagen, there hasn’t been much to blog about recently.  Thanks to the support people at iPage for help on getting set up and Robbie Abed of rawdesignr for his suggestions.

We try to provide insightful commentary about carbon markets and advocate for sensible energy policy that sets America up to succeed.  We started the Climafixit service because existing retailers simply charge customers too much to retire carbon credits.  We understand that price should not be the overriding factor when choosing carbon credits.  However, emissions credits trade on open markets and it is of no benefit to the customer to completely disregard price.

There is a wide range in prices of credits issued from different voluntary and mandatory standards in the US and around the world.  While quality is certainly a concern, the price of an emission credit is driven mainly by whether or not it is accepted (or is expected to be accepted) as valid within a mandatory emissions reduction program (like the EU ETS or RGGI).  We have selected credits for our inventory that represent a range of prices while maintaining quality across the board.  All of the projects we buy credits from have been audited to make certain that the credits they yield are equivalent to eliminating one metric ton of carbon dioxide from the environment.  The price differences between our credits are due to the perceived likelihoods of different standards being included in future mandatory cap-and-trade programs.

We have sorted through the hodgepodge of credits out there and feel that each of our selections will have a certain appeal to customers.  The landfill gas and agriculturual methane protocols produce the highest quality credits the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) has to offer.  Long-term sequestration is not an issue with methane destruction, it is easily measured and it is unquestionably additional.  These credits are a great value without giving up anything in quality.

For customers who wish to pay a bit more and retire credits immediately (CCX credits must be retired in lots of 100,  please check out our policy in our FAQ), we offer Climate Action Reserve (CAR) credits from a forestry conservation project.  These credits are more expensive because it is virtually certain that they will be valid in the California state cap-and-trade program mandated by AB32.

There is no scientific difference in the environmental impact of any of our credits.  We believe it is important for customers to have choices at different price points and we want to offer better value and selection than existing retailers.  If you don’t offset your footprint, think about doing so.  If you already do so, consider our options and know that you could be retiring twice as many credits for the same price of existing retailers.  You will be retiring only carbon offsets (not RECs for reasons explained here), you will know precisely what project your credits came from and you will get a better deal.

Please leave any suggestions in the comment section.  If there is demand in the future we would be happy to offer credits from other standards but felt CCX and CAR were the best two options to start.

I found a very interesting blog post via @greenwind on Twitter today at BioFuelsWatch. Google filed paperwork late last year to create its own subsidiary and Max Rutherford points out that:

Parallel to the founding of the subsidiary, it also put in a request in conjunction with a federal agency to enter the wholesale market in order to both buy and sell electricity.

Google’s purpose appears to be focused on more easily achieving carbon neutrality and increasing operational efficiency rather than becoming a bona fide power company. However with services such as PowerMeter it seems that Google potentially could be a big player in future smart grid applications. It would not surprise me at all if Google came up with a process to manage its own energy preferences and electricity requirements that could ultimately be extended to other companies and individual users. Wholesale electricity is a notoriously volatile and difficult product to price since there is no ability to store excesses and short-term spikes can occur at any time. Google may view solving such a problem to be an important contribution to society and certainly has the resources to become a serious energy/electricity player if it so desired.

I will be interested to see how aggressive Google is when entering into these markets and am also interested to see how other market participants react if/when Google becomes more than a minor player. Google is constantly trying to find ways to leverage the enormous amount of information it has access to and I believe that expertise will eventually make them successful in this new foray.