Publication Name

KICK THE HABIT

THE CYCLE – OFFSET

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In the future, new concepts such as

Personal Carbon Trading

, carbon label-

ling or integrated offsets will certainly receive further attention.

Easy offset

When you buy a ticked on the EasyJet airline website and before the flight

is booked, you are asked if you would like to offset the emissions from

the flight you are just about to purchase. The offsets offered by the com-

pany are CERs created from CDM projects. The non-profit scheme works

fairly easy. The airline calculates the carbon emitted from the passenger

flight and buys an equivalent share from a range of CERs. By avoiding

any middle-man and buying directly from the pool of offsets available

the company can keep the cost low and forward this advantage to its

customers.

The projects supported by this scheme range from biomass to wind

farms. One project for example supported by EasyJet customers is the

construction of the Perlabi hydropower plant that uses water from Chi-

rizacha River in the Andes in Ecuador, South America. The emission

reduction in the first decade is expected to be about 74 000 tonnes. The

project generates clean electricity, reducing reliance on fossil fuel power

generation as well as creating benefits and job opportunities to the local

community.

Personal Carbon Trading refers to the act of equally allocating emissions credits to

individuals on a per capita basis, within national carbon budgets (for an example

of how this would work, see the United Kingdom Climate Change Bill). Individuals

would probably hold their emissions credits in electronic accounts and surrender

them when they made carbon-related purchases, such as electricity, heating fuel

and petrol. People wanting more energy would be able to take part in emissions

trading to secure more credits, just as companies do now within the EU ETS.

There are no working schemes at the moment. Current proposals include Tradable

Energy Quotas – which would bring other sectors of society (e.g. industry) within

the scope of the scheme – and Personal Carbon Allowances. These proposals could

be applied on a national or multinational basis. Proponents of personal carbon

trading claim it could increase “carbon literacy”, helping people to make a fair

contribution to reducing CO

emissions (and ultimately those of other GHGs). It

could allow the burden of reducing emissions to be shared evenly throughout the

economy, rather than focusing all the attention on business and governments, and

could encourage more localized economies.