The Ins and Outs of Carbon Offsets

To be a carbon-neutral company, you must balance the amount of CO2 your business emits (your carbon footprint) with equal reductions in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. You can shrink your footprint significantly by reducing your greenhouse gas emissions. But a skinny carbon footprint won't necessarily make your business carbon neutral. To do that, you'll need to offset your remaining greenhouse gas emissions. We'll show you how:

How Carbon Offsets Work

A carbon offset represents the reduction of a specific amount of greenhouse gases. By purchasing carbon offsets, you help finance the development of clean and renewable energy projects such as wind turbines, solar arrays, methane projects for family farms and landfill gas capture systems. Your purchase adds more clean energy to the power grid, thus reducing the demand for electricity from fossil fuels.

Where to Buy Carbon Offsets

Native Energy offers business-specific offsets including offsets for travel companies, events and business travel. With Native Energy you can choose to support a specific project, such as the Wanner Family Dairy Farm Methane Project. Native Energy also offers renewable energy credits, which are pretty much the same as buying green power from your utility company. You can select 100% wind power, 100% methane power or 50% wind/50% methane. Offsetting a flight from JFK to LAX would cost $24.

Carbonfund, which prides itself on offering the lowest prices, sells offsets to support projects in renewable energy, energy efficiency and reforestation. These offsets go for $5.50 per ton. Offsets for the same flight would cost $4.92.