with a local cause. Almost everything we do requires energy in one form or another. And that energy, more often than not, comes from fossil fuels.
----
It’s possible for each of us to quantify our own contribution to global warming. We all have a carbon footprint, named after carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Your carbon footprint is the total of all the greenhouse gas emissions caused by your daily activities.
Driving is one source of greenhouse gas emissions, but it isn’t the only one. Most likely your home uses just as much energy as your car. Heating your house and keeping the lights on has just as much impact as driving.
Another big source of greenhouse gas emissions is plane travel. Flying is fast, cheap, and polluting. A round-trip flight between New York and Los Angeles burns about 100 gallons of kerosene per passenger. TerraPass allows you to use carbon offsets to lighten your climate change footprint.
What is a carbon offset? Although a complex topic, it is a simple thing. A carbon offset represents the reduction of one ton of carbon dioxide emissions. When you buy an offset, you fund that reduction in emissions.
Carbon offsets typically come from clean energy or efficiency projects. For example, wind farms create clean electricity that displaces electricity from coal. A utility company receives power from a wind farm, so it can produce that much less power by burning coal. The result is a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Wind farms generate clean electricity. They also generate carbon offsets.
The important feature of highquality carbon offsets is that they represent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would not have happened otherwise. High-quality carbon offsets are a means of hastening our transition to a clean energy infrastructure. High-quality offset vendors, such as TerraPass, use a variety of verification techniques, including independent audits, to ensure that the offsets have the intended effect.
There are lots of things you can do to lower your energy use. But you can’t reduce your energy use to zero, which is where carbon offsets come into play. You can use carbon offsets to balance out the emissions you can’t eliminate through personal conservation.
Ed is a perfect example. His personal carbon footprint is very low, because he generates his own solar electricity and drives an electric car. But for longer trips, he drives a hybrid car, which runs on gasoline. And for really long trips, he and Rachelle fly.
To balance out the emissions from these activities, Ed buys a TerraPass. TerraPass makes products designed to balance emissions from driving, flying, and home energy use. By purchasing a TerraPass, Ed funds verified reductions in greenhouse gas emissions so that he can travel carbonbalanced. More important, he helps move us a little further down the road toward clean energy.
—Adam Stein
----
Essentially, TerraPass goes to the marketplace and buys new clean power—solar power, wind power, something that does not emit CO2—then that clean power gets fed into the grid, augmenting what is created by utility companies.
Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s kind of a feel-good thing, but is it really doing anything?”
Let me be clear: It does not negate the real pollution created from a tailpipe of a car or from somebody’s home energy use or from air travel. That’s real. That’s out there. You’re not taking that away. But neither are you taking away the green power that they’re putting in the system. That’s real, too. And over time, that could balance out and account for the closure of power plants. At some point, they’ll be shutting down coal plants because they have sufficient power coming from clean sources. (We’ll go into this more in Chapter 4, “Energy.”) If every air passenger bought a TerraPass each time he or she flew, it would be a very real contribution to creating greener energy for all of
----
It’s possible for each of us to quantify our own contribution to global warming. We all have a carbon footprint, named after carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Your carbon footprint is the total of all the greenhouse gas emissions caused by your daily activities.
Driving is one source of greenhouse gas emissions, but it isn’t the only one. Most likely your home uses just as much energy as your car. Heating your house and keeping the lights on has just as much impact as driving.
Another big source of greenhouse gas emissions is plane travel. Flying is fast, cheap, and polluting. A round-trip flight between New York and Los Angeles burns about 100 gallons of kerosene per passenger. TerraPass allows you to use carbon offsets to lighten your climate change footprint.
What is a carbon offset? Although a complex topic, it is a simple thing. A carbon offset represents the reduction of one ton of carbon dioxide emissions. When you buy an offset, you fund that reduction in emissions.
Carbon offsets typically come from clean energy or efficiency projects. For example, wind farms create clean electricity that displaces electricity from coal. A utility company receives power from a wind farm, so it can produce that much less power by burning coal. The result is a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Wind farms generate clean electricity. They also generate carbon offsets.
The important feature of highquality carbon offsets is that they represent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that would not have happened otherwise. High-quality carbon offsets are a means of hastening our transition to a clean energy infrastructure. High-quality offset vendors, such as TerraPass, use a variety of verification techniques, including independent audits, to ensure that the offsets have the intended effect.
There are lots of things you can do to lower your energy use. But you can’t reduce your energy use to zero, which is where carbon offsets come into play. You can use carbon offsets to balance out the emissions you can’t eliminate through personal conservation.
Ed is a perfect example. His personal carbon footprint is very low, because he generates his own solar electricity and drives an electric car. But for longer trips, he drives a hybrid car, which runs on gasoline. And for really long trips, he and Rachelle fly.
To balance out the emissions from these activities, Ed buys a TerraPass. TerraPass makes products designed to balance emissions from driving, flying, and home energy use. By purchasing a TerraPass, Ed funds verified reductions in greenhouse gas emissions so that he can travel carbonbalanced. More important, he helps move us a little further down the road toward clean energy.
—Adam Stein
----
Essentially, TerraPass goes to the marketplace and buys new clean power—solar power, wind power, something that does not emit CO2—then that clean power gets fed into the grid, augmenting what is created by utility companies.
Maybe you’re thinking, “That’s kind of a feel-good thing, but is it really doing anything?”
Let me be clear: It does not negate the real pollution created from a tailpipe of a car or from somebody’s home energy use or from air travel. That’s real. That’s out there. You’re not taking that away. But neither are you taking away the green power that they’re putting in the system. That’s real, too. And over time, that could balance out and account for the closure of power plants. At some point, they’ll be shutting down coal plants because they have sufficient power coming from clean sources. (We’ll go into this more in Chapter 4, “Energy.”) If every air passenger bought a TerraPass each time he or she flew, it would be a very real contribution to creating greener energy for all of
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