Be Green, Earn Green, See Red
From the “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” department comes a website that promises to pay you to save energy, and no, it’s not your local utility.
Just a few days after I warned about the potential harm brought by companies that financed and sold “creative” carbon offsets, I stumbled upon MyEmissionsExchange.com.
The hook works something like this: you upload your utility bills from the last 12 months to act as a baseline. Then, you get to work changing light bulbs and line-drying your clothes, and as you do, energy use goes down. MyEEx then calculates the carbon savings and sells the offset on the international carbon market, passing you a share of the dough via PayPal. Sounds awesome, right?
Well, making money is fun, but those offsets you just sold are basically bogus from a climate change standpoint. Surprise, you just became an environmental snake oil salesman, and you didn’t even know it.
Carbon accounting has a few rules when it comes to verifying an offset, and one of the most confusing is the rule of additionality. Additionality asks the question, “Would this emission reduction have occurred even without the sale of an offset?” According to the GHG Project Protocol (the de facto standard in carbon accounting):
The difficulty is that many projects that reduce GHG emissions (relative
to historical levels) would happen regardless of the existence of
a GHG program and without any concern for climate change mitigation.
If a project “would have happened anyway,” then issuing offset
credits for its GHG reductions will actually allow a positive net
increase in GHG emissions, undermining the emissions target of the
GHG program.
In other words, if you already have a good incentive to save energy in your home regardless of MyEEx, then you can’t call your efforts an offset. Doing so would lead to a net increase in carbon emissions, because instead of just decreasing your own emissions, you’re contributing to the increase of whomever buys the offset.
How do you know if a project is additional? There are a few tests that may help:
- Legal – Are you required by law to implement this project? If so, it’s not additional.
- Investment – Does the project make financial sense without the additional revenue from an offset? Not additional.
- Common practice – Is everyone else already doing it? You know the drill.
I’d argue that most of the projects you’d undertake to save energy at home ALSO save you money on your utility bills, thereby violating the Investment Test. If you look at MyEEx’s suggestions for energy savings, it’s clear these are common sense money-savers (some of which I’ve done in my own house this past year – no offset required).
I wish this was the last we’d see of questionable or deceitful carbon accounting practices, but I fear this is just the beginning. Get your boots and shovels ready…
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