AS word of global warming spreads from US university ivory towers and laboratories to clubs, pubs and dormitories, many students are taking action to save the planet: They’re pulling out their credit cards.
Companies such as TerraPass.com are selling carbon “offsets” to ordinary consumers -including a growing number of students.
These companies are part of a booming $30 million “green industry”, according to The Nation magazine. They promise to donate the money (after deducting a little for themselves) to wind-power companies and organizations planting trees in developing countries.
It works like this: A college sophomore who drives a 1995 Buick Skylark 12,000 miles annually can calculate the carbon dioxide output on Terrapass.com. Based on this specific information, the TerraPass webpage says that $49.95 will offset the amount of CO2 produced by that car. TerraPass also offers offsets for dormitories and airline flights.
“Essentially it’s a form of self-taxation,” explained The Nation’s A. C. Thompson and Duane Moles. And for some students, the price is right.
At the University of Maryland, students voted overwhelmingly in last semester’s student government elections to increase student fees so that they could buy carbon offsets and erase their “carbon footprint” from campus.
“With clean energy, you consider the facts, lay out the costs and look at yourself and say, ‘That’s not hard to answer’. For $12 a year -that’s $1 a month,” senior Sam Snellings, chairman of the student government’s environmental affairs committee, told the University of Maryland’s independent student newspaper.
US university students have proven to be a promising market for companies like Terrapass. However, an April 2007 Financial Times investigation suggests they should beware of the murky side of the business.
The “green gold rush” has given way to “widespread instances of people and organizations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions,” reads the report. In some cases, companies were asking customers to clean up their own mess.
For instance, the chemical company DuPont asked consumers to donate $4 to eliminate one ton of carbon dioxide from its plant in the US state of Kentucky.
Time magazine columnist Charles Krauthammer doesn’t think buying offsets is such a good idea. Customers who buy them can feel good about themselves, he writes. But they’re not actually cutting back on their CO2 output.
Instead, they could be buying offsets from a dirty power plant that’s “selling... carbon credits just to bring its output down to a normal rate of pollution. The result? The polluter gets very rich. The planet continues to cook.”
The Hollywood elite have been the most vocal about buying carbon offsets. But, then again, they’re the ones with the mansions and Maseratis. Still, ordinary people are increasingly chipping in to buy carbon offsets from companies like TerraPass.com. After filling out online forms about their car model, home electricity output and air travel, they receive their estimated carbon dioxide outputs and recommended purchasing plans for carbon offsets.
Companies selling carbon offsets, like TerraPass.com, promise to pass their customers’ money on to certain environment-friendly organizations and power companies. And as the Financial Times points out, there are both regulated and unregulated “green industries”. Consumers tend to invest in the unregulated industry. Companies and corporations buy carbon credits on a regulated international carbon credit exchange similar to that of the NASDAQ.
