Misstropolis

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Smaller Shoes for Your Carbon Footprint

by Rachael Moeller Gorman

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You know a cute little hybrid would look great in your driveway, but the two car seats, three kids and German shepherd beg to differ. Enter Green Piggy, a Hingham-based company that lets you to make up for the carbon your gas-guzzling SUV spews into the atmosphere by reducing greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere in the world. An adorable sticker smacked on your vehicle’s rear end proves it.

The company’s concept springs from co-owners Tricia Powers and sister Christine Nichols’ double lives. “I drive a Highlander,” says Powers, who grew up recycling and using fluorescent bulbs before it was cool. “We’re environmentalists, but once you have families, SUVs are hard to give up.” It’s the truth – a nation of highways and long commutes, the United States spews more carbon into the atmosphere than any other country. But this increasingly heavy carbon blanket is driving up the temperature of the world.

With Green Piggy, then, the sisters help consumers ease the damage they’re doing to the environment by selling so-called “carbon offsets.” Carbon offsets balance out personal carbon emissions by reducing or eliminating carbon emissions somewhere else. Here’s how it works: Say a developer builds a clean emission reductions project, such as a wind farm or a hydroelectric plant, in China, and this new plant replaces some older, carbon-spewing facility, say, a coal-burning power plant. This swap prevents thousands of tons of carbon from entering the atmosphere, and the developers sell this reduction as carbon offsets to people all over the world. Large businesses striving to be “carbon neutral” buy the offsets; individuals can buy them as well, through companies like Green Piggy. Green Piggy’s particular clean energy projects include wind farms, landfill gas projects (using methane, another greenhouse gas, emitted by landfills to generate power) and hydroelectric plants. The offsets are verified by a third party to make sure the reductions are permanent and the offsets haven’t been counted twice (among other criteria).

Consumers can calculate how much their car, home and air travel emit each year on the Green Piggy website. For example, let’s say you drive your Toyota Highlander 15,000 miles a year. That comes out to almost six tons of carbon dioxide. You could buy a carbon offset for $77.95 to eliminate six tons of carbon dioxide emissions somewhere else in the world (a Honda Civic driven the same number of miles emits a third less carbon and costs $47.95 for offsets). Since global warming is a world-wide problem, it doesn’t matter where greenhouse gases are emitted or reduced. You can also offset your home (electricity and oil heat for a single-family home releases about 9.4 tons of carbon each year; an offset costs $85 and scores you a piggy refrigerator magnet), and your airplane flights (two round-trip cross-country trips a year emits two tons of carbon dioxide and costs $16.45 for offsets, and you get a luggage tag declaring your green-spiritness to the world).

At the moment, the United States does not regulate or cap carbon emissions, unlike the 37 other developed countries that are bound by the Kyoto Protocol’s limits on greenhouse gas emission, so consumers offset their emissions out of the goodness of their heart (and the power of their guilt). As the motto goes, reduce, recycle and when you can’t reduce anymore, offset. Companies like Green Piggy won’t cure global warming, but, as Powers says, “We’re not extreme environmentalists. We’re thinking about the future for our kids. We like to say, just do something.”