Accountability: Utility Buys 'Verifiable' Carbon Offset Forest Credits While Groups Move to Boost Trust
Northern California utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company on Tuesday (Feb. 26) announced it had entered into a large carbon offset deal amounting to 214,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions. A Wall Street Journal Web site reported the company was spending more than $2 million on the initiative, or about $10 per ton. The action was praised by officials as a needed example of a verifiable offset.
The announcement came on the same day as some groups called for greater accountability for offset programs, warning that bad press about them could harm legitimate reduction efforts. "Without credibility, it becomes a shell game," Janet Peace, senior economist of the nonprofit Pew Center on Global Climate Change, told a gathering at a conference in San Francisco. The conference, Carbon Forum America, drew more than 1,000 people from businesses, government and non-governmental organizations to discuss issues surrounding the burgeoning emissions trading market.
The Pew organization is one of six nonprofit groups involved in the Offset Quality Initiative, which participants said was intended to support policy makers as they develop regulatory standards for climate change policies involving offsets. They distinguished their efforts from others that are intended to address voluntary emissions offsets.
"Our primary focus is on the regulatory side," said Mike Burnett, executive director of Portland, Oregon's The Climate Trust, one of the groups involved in the project. But he said it was not the coalition's goal to develop its own standards or to rate those developed by others.
Peace, however, said it was important to have some standards and to allow them to have some flexibility to make room for innovative projects. At the same time, she advocated the concept of "additionality," a buzz word that covers "high quality" projects that would not have happened but for offset programs being in place.
"If you"ve been doing it for 20 years and somebody comes to you and says, 'I'm gong to pay you for an offset -- well, that's not a very high-quality offset," Peace said.
The projects getting funding under the PG&E deal all have a stamp of approval from the California Climate Action Registry, a state-formed nonprofit that is one of the entities involved in the Offset Quality Initiative. PG&E's announcement included a statement from Gary Gero, interim president of the registry, who commended the utility "for taking on the challenge to fund real, transparent and verifiable carbon emission reduction projects."
Most of PG&E's purchase, 200,000 metric tons, comes from The Conservation Fund's Garcia River Forest (pictured, from Conservation Fund Web site). Although owned by a conservation organization, the 24,000-acre redwood and Douglas fir forest is being managed as a working timber producer, according to a statement from the organization. The credits derive from the fact that less timber is harvested than allowed under a "sustainable" easement on the land held by the Nature Conservancy.
As the Conservation Fund put it:
"The Fund harvests trees significantly below the maximum amount allowed by the easement and by California’s stringent environmental regulations. It is this sustainable management practice that provides “additionality” by trapping more CO2 in the trees than would normally be trapped with allowable harvest levels. This additional salvaged CO2 is sold as certified emissions reductions credits, calculated by independent auditors and verified through the Registry."
Money for the purchases, which also include 14,000 credits from the Sempervirens Fund, which protects giant sequoias, comes from ClimateSmart program in which PG&E customers voluntarily enroll and pay extra on their utility bills to make their energy use "climate neutral."
Among the efforts to certify voluntary market programs was a project announced by the Center for Resource Solutions, a San Francisco nonprofit. Its Green-e Climate, according to a statement and presentations made at the Carbon Forum conference, requires that "greenhouse gas emission reductions be verified according to strict project-level certification." The goal is to guarantee consumers clear information about the projects, that offsets have not been double-sold or double-counted and that they come from projects that would not have happened "business as usual." The program relies on certifications including those offered by the Clean Development Mechanism, the Gold Standard and the Voluntary Carbon Standard. Green-e announced it had certified offerings by four retailers of carbon offsets, including one, 3Degrees, that has among its portfolio a project in Brazil that captures methane from hog farms.
"We are verifying the products that are being sold to consumers," said Lars Kvale, Green-e climate manager, at the San Francisco conference. In many cases, he said, consumers "don't necessarily know what they're getting or what they're buying."
