I was in London working as a software developer for the fashion industry in 1999 when my mate Ross Williams, 45, phoned me from Australia, says David Sag, 43, CEO, Carbon Planet. “I saw a 4 corners program on carbon emissions,” he told me excitedly,” then there was silence as he gathered his thoughts. “I’ve done the maths and I reckon each person emits $50 of carbon a year. Do you realize what that means?”
I remembered listening to James Lovelock, famous for his Gaia hypothesis, talk about running out time and his words rang again in my ears, “Less than a fifth of the world’s population will be around in fifty years. The rest will be dead of viruses and famine and no water. “
I also remembered the boiled frog parable, the frog keeps adapting as the water heats up to meet an untimely death. Something in me started to tingle. “Start putting your loose coins into the kitty, we’ll work on it.” Over the next five years we investigated carbon credits while we both kept our day jobs.
By 2000 I was living in Bulgaria with my wife, helping to build a carbon emissions component into a software programme to be used for an interactive street map. The map would show how much a cyclist can save in carbon emissions by cycling to work instead of driving a car.
Then my lawyer phoned me, “You can’t keep running this as a hobby. Buy some credits and start trading like a business.” So Ross and I hired an office manager and built a website and then bought 2000 tonnes of greenhouse gas carbon credits from the New South Wales government. We worked out that we could sell the credits in smaller lots using our website as the retail outlet.
Ross took the lead by selling his business and investing a million-and-a-half dollars into our new business – Carbon Planet. “It’s time to come home and be the CEO,” he told me.
In 2005 my wife and I arrived back in Adelaide to see our new office. We hired some engineers to do the carbon auditing, and trained them in doing life-cycle analysis to help businesses understand where their carbon emissions come from, and how they can reduce them. Then we set to work to develop our registry by creating partnerships with groups like landcare, and farmers who wanted to invest in soil captured carbon.
Sequestriation means sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Trees and plants sequester carbon from the air by photosynthesis and turn the carbon dioxide into sugars and breath out oxygen.
What does that mean for you and me? Trees are planted and each tree has credits against it. These are bought by every day people and businesses in the form of a certificate which represents a certain number of credits. You can proudly show your certificate to your friends and say, “this means I’ve bought a forest of trees which has been planted and will be maintained for 100 years.” To their interested yet puzzled response you can explain, “for every 5 trees I buy, I’ve offset 1 tonne of my carbon dioxide emissions.”
After I returned from my three-week trip across the US I calculated how much carbon I’d used and then purchased carbon credits to offset that amount of carbon. But we try to stay home and using skype or video conferencing instead of travel as much as we can becaue it’s still a better option for the environment.
Carbon credits aren’t going to save the world. There’s over 50 billion tones of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere and there isn’t the same amount of carbon credits to offset that. So this scheme is like a bridge and something we can all do now while we gear up to make big changes to our lifestyles, rather than end up like the boiled frog.
For more information go to: www.carbonplanet.com
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 0 comments… add one now }