Carbon Offsets... Buyer Beware  | Fri Jan. 19, 2007 2:17 PM GMT
Carbon offsets are in. Everybody's doing it. And Wall Street
knows it, which is why here and abroad companies from London's
Marks & Spencer to Dell Computers are clamoring to make you,
too, "carbon neutral." A crowded field of for-profit offset
providers have sprung up, promising to do everything from
reforesting the California redwoods to building solar powered
greenhouses in India.  But if Expedia can make that flight from
LaGuardia to Heathrow guilt free for only ten extra bucks, how
is one to know whether the offsets one has bought are really
making that cross-Atlantic trip carbon even-steven? At the
moment, it's pretty much a crapshoot (with carbon offset prices
ranging from $3.56 to $30 a metric ton). But the UK hopes to
change that before the Greenland ice sheet melts into their
precious gulfstream. The country's Ministry of Environment
announced yesterday that it would set standards for rating the
new club of carbon merchants. That way w