Carbon Offsets (aka carbon credits): Is your business buying them?

There's been quite a bit of talk lately about businesses and some individuals buying carbon offsets to 'balance things out' and reduce their impact on the environment. So, I'm curious if the company you work for or run has considered doing so and perhaps it's something you could suggest to them?

The company I work for does a lot of travelling and we explored the option, but a detailed analysis showed that the value wasn't there. A majority of the organizations that offer the offset credit don't explicity detail where you money goes so there's a bit of a black-box there (that we didn't like).
There were others where the projects were deemed to be environmentally beneficial but upon further analysis, the calculations were quite suspect (i.e. grossly overesitmating the environmental benefits).

In addition, trying to find operating costs and % of total money that goes towards the project (as opposed to % that goes towards the business costs) were also suspect.

The whole idea of "carbon credits" has always seemed a little fishy to me. If the money is going to a good cause and being used for planting trees or something like that its great. It worries me, though, when airline companies can optionally add $10 to your ticket price to "offset" the carbon the flight produces. I wonder where those extra monies go and if they're not just going straight into their profits?

I don't work for Dell but I did find this when I was working on something else the other day...

I'm not sure I buy into the whole carbon neutral argument as a good way to deal with the bigger problem but I did find this to be a pretty impressive statement to come from tech company the size of Dell.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Carbon Neutral
Today we announced our latest environmental initiative – Dell will become the first major computer company to neutralize the carbon impact of its worldwide operations.

http://direct2dell.com/one2one/archi.../26/30748.aspx