Carbon offsets follow up

Following the post on carbon offsets I received an email from Climate Friendly. I'm impressed that they're watching the blogosphere (my wife hates that word), and that they're willing to participate in even small discussions like ours.

---

I've read the discussion and wanted to mention that the approach that Climate Friendly takes to the issues you're discussing is to communicate a complete message covering efficiency, renewables and offsets plus advocating very strong government policy. For example a number of our customers have a Prius, run their home on Green Power and offset their car emissions, while others do whichever of these they can afford today. Our interest in promoting efficiency is evidenced by the fact that we have many of Australias leading energy efficiency companies, engineers and architects as customers. Picture sof the buildings they have designed are in the URL below. One of these cut emissions 60% by efficiency measures and then used our GreenPower plus carbon offsets to achieve Climate Neutral status. We are very active promoting the achievement of Climate Neutrality through a combination of efficiency, GreenPower and offsets.

My contribution to the more general question of how offsets can be meaningful in an overall context is summarised in an article sent to New Internationalist regarding their article last year about carbon offsets.
URL is
http://www.climatefriendly.com/pdfs/climate%20friendly%20-%20%20Reduce%20Renew%20and%20Offset%20strategy.pdf

This covers voluntary action but we need regulatory action too, urgently.

An article advocating strong government policy is available at http://www.climatefriendly.com/newsletter/goodpolicy.php

Kind regards
Joel Fleming | Managing Director | Climate Friendly

By the way for our emission calcs we are very careful to use the correct emission factors for the baseline case that our projectrs avoid.
For the NZ wind project the carbon credits are based on an "Avoided" gas power plant ..which creates a very low quantity of credits. This means that if you buy carbon creidt from us its not overclaiming by using "brown coal" baseline.