Saturday, January 16, 2010

Factors To Consider Before Purchasing Carbon Offset

By Joy Bennett

With the threat of global warming looming large over our fragile environment, free market solutions like carbon offset and carbon credits that are succeeding as powerful tools for environment protection have caught the fancy of individuals as well as organizations.

If you have been responsible for ecological degradation and now want to contribute towards cleaning the environment, then you can purchase an amount of carbon offset equivalent to your entire amount of CO2 emissions. Your buying of a carbon offset helps finance environment friendly projects such as power generation units making use of wind farms and tidal energy.

Before buying a carbon offset, it will be a prudent idea to recognize what causes the release of greenhouse gases in your everyday life. Among our daily activities that result in carbon emissions, the main are driving, flying in airplanes and making use of appliances that result in high power consumption.

Once you have identified these activities, you must plan to give up some of them and reduce some as far as practicable. Doing this would help you to greatly lessen your role in degrading the environment. You can reduce your energy consumption by using energy efficient lighting, by driving less and also by installing appropriate insulation to save energy while using heating or air conditioning appliances.

After you have considered the steps you can adopt to reduce emissions, you must make an estimate of your remaining carbon footprint, i.e., the amount of greenhouse emissions caused by your remaining actions that are beyond your reasonable control. Most actions have their own specific manner of emission calculation, but you can get a lot of good calculators online that will help you in this regard.

When you buy an offset, the offset providers balance your carbon footprint by reducing emissions at any location in any nation. Projects offered by offset providers for reducing emissions are plenty, and you can put your money in any one that seems appropriate to you. But you should be cautious before investing in a project. To ensure that your money will be used properly you must only pick projects with sound credentials. Many accrediting agencies conduct extensive checks on authenticity and efficacy to certify projects, and it is always a sensible idea to invest in an approved and authentic project.

Finally, you should gather sufficient information on the subject from different sources. Through research, you will come to know the authentic offset providers and the kinds of projects that are suitable for investment, and you can also closely track how the project you have invested in is performing.

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