Offsetting your CO2 Emissions

King Damager

King Damager

King Damager

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So, I'm sure some of you won't care two hoots about this, but some of you may find it interesting.

I've recently been writing an essay regarding Climate Change, and in particular renewable energy, and have discovered a few interesting facts about CO2 Emissions, and trying to offset costs.

For example, very recent research (Jan, 2013) shows that the EU cap and trade scheme, through an unusual mechanism results in it actually being environmentally better to fly within the EU then get a bus from a total emission perspective (rather than a personal emission perspective).

Anyway, for all those who are interested in reducing your CO2 emissions, I wonder if you have seen this site before:
sandbag.org.uk

Basically, the cap and trade scheme limits the total number of CO2 emissions you can produce across the whole UK from the largest industry producers (however the holes in what are and aren't capped lead to the bus example). Anyway, you can buy part of this limit, and charities like sandbag allow you to 'retire' or not use the permit meaning total EU emissions of CO2 fall.

It costs about £9-£10 a ton, and the average person within the UK accounts for almost 10 tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.

Basically, you can go Carbon Neutral for £100 a year.

If people are interested, I'm also pretty sure this is how companies like M&S go 'Carbon Neutral'

kd
 
Do you feel this actually makes a difference given the relentless growth in emissions from countries such as china, or do you feel that it has the effect of damaging our own economy just to make a point?
 
King Damager said:
Anyway, you can buy part of this limit, and charities like sandbag allow you to 'retire' or not use the permit meaning total EU emissions of CO2 fall.
Click to expand...

How's that sorry? Don't really follow the link between paying and reducing EU emissions.

Anyway, paying extra to be carbon neutral is something that I'm simply never going to do personally, because I'm too keen to spend that money on my family and myself having already shelled out £400 p.a. in VED and god-knows-what in fuel-related tax.

I think this is a big problem with these schemes. Most people believe that they already pay for emitting CO2. That and the 'what about him Miss' argument as presented by [TW]Fox.
 
I wonder how much energy is wasted in the OP's superfluous 'kd', it must be something like 27 pixels or thereabouts and he's posted 14,000+ times so that's around 378,000 unnecessary pixels, not there's around 4000 people using these forums right now so that's a possible 1,512,000,000 pixels, take into consideration that they could be viewed multiple times in various threads then the energy wasted from just that gets quite ridiculous just from the monitor pixel count, think of the planet!

kd
 
Just plant more ****ing trees and let us live our lives enjoying it rather than worrying about every single bit of CO2 that may or may not be created somewhere down the line....

Oh and lol @ climatechange - it's been happening for billions of years. It'll keep happening long after we're gone.
 
I learn't about the cap n trade scheme at A-level Geography. It was interesting seeing how the big businesses traded carbon credits and that it is taken pretty seriously per countrries allocated carbon credits..

However in the end I agree with Freefaller above. "it's been happening for billions of years"

Also not distrupt methane crystals settling on the ocean floor :(
 
The scheme seems flawed, like so many things based on an ok idea.


I wish the grip would lessen on co2 and concentrate on environment as a whole.
I think we could all gree it would better without smog in cities, protected parts of sea/forests/other areas. Cleaner rivers that can support life, less carbon particulates clogging up our lungs and making everything dirty. Etc etc.
 
So basically what you want to do is make the EU even more uncompetitive against ASIA who don't give any regard to the climate change and do all the manufacturing jobs there?

YAY im really up for this GO EU!
 
The Running Man said:
So basically what you want to do is make the EU even more uncompetitive against ASIA who don't give any regard to the climate change and do all the manufacturing jobs there?

YAY im really up for this GO EU!
Click to expand...

Or do the opposite and give us the energy security, job sector skills etc, in the future and the biggest growing markets.
And actually china etc are doing stuff. They have said they want to do carbon capture on their new coal power plants.
 
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