There's No Transparency in the Carbon-Offset Market

Adam Piore today profiles Tom Arnold of TerraPass, a for-profit company selling carbon offsets to guilty gas-guzzling liberals. TerraPass is very secretive about its "revenue, profits, or even how much it has invested so far in carbon-offset projects", which means that no one using TerraPass has any clue how much of their money goes to carbon offsets and how much goes to amortize the cost of Tom Arnold's SUV.

I see no reason to use a for-profit carbon-offset company when there's no shortage of non-profits who will do the same thing. But in any case the whole system of cruising around the web looking for a vaguely reputable carbon-offset company is hugely inefficient. Already there's a cacophony of competing standards, each of which seeks to certify carbon offsets as being kosher: there's the Voluntary Carbon Standard, Green-e, CCB Standards, the Gold Standard, and, I'm sure, many others too. One could look in detail into all of them, and then look for a merchant who was certified by as many of them as possible, but it all seems like a huge onus to place on the consumer.

What's more, the various different merchants offering carbon offsets differ not only in how much they charge per ton of carbon offset, but also in terms of how much carbon they consider a transatlantic flight, for instance, to emit. Basically, the whole thing's a mess. If you spend more money offsetting a ton of carbon than your neighbor did, does that mean you were ripped off, or that you just invested in a better project? Right now, nobody really knows.

What would be wonderful would be if there could be a genuine market in carbon credits, rather than the inefficient mix of semi-competition and secretiveness which characterizes the status quo. Prices have to become much more transparent than they are now: merchants should sell their carbon offsets not directly to consumers but rather only through a market with real price transparency. At the very least, every trade should be reported to a central price recorder, even if it was sold bilaterally.

If there were different prices for offsets certified by different standards organizations, that would be fine: many people would be fine paying a little more to be sure that their offsets were certified by the Gold Standard, for instance. But right now, many people reasonably shun the carbon-offset industry because they have no idea whether they're simply being taken for a ride by the likes of TerraPass. On the other side of the transaction, people setting up wind turbines and the like have no way of making sure that they're selling their carbon credits to the highest bidder: a transparent market would help there, too.

There are already big international exchanges for industrial quantities of carbon being traded under Kyoto-mandated cap-and-trade schemes. Can't someone come up with an exchange for much smaller quantities of carbon being traded in the retail carbon-offset market?

Update: Russell Simon from Carbonfund.org points me to a very useful survey of how much different offset providers charge: anywhere, it seems, from $3.96 to more than $41 per ton of carbon offset. Carbonfund.org itself would seem to be a good choice: it's not only significantly cheaper than TerraPass, but is also a non-profit.

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