Carbon Retirement

18th July 2008

Dan, colleague and top eco blogger, launched Carbon Retirement this week. It’s a new twist on carbon offsetting - you can actually buy (and then retire) carbon credits and from the official EU exchange. As the site explains:

Carbon Retirement uses your money to purchase carbon allowances out of the EU Emission Trading Scheme. This is the EU’s central tool for cutting carbon emissions. It works by giving heavy industry a fixed number of allowances to emit greenhouse gases.

Each time we buy an allowance, we retire it. Retiring permanently removes allowances from the market so they are unavailable to the industries that would otherwise use them as rights to pollute. You buy emissions out of the system.

The logic of cap-and-trade is that as the price of carbon credits goes up, it gets more attractive for polluting firms to reduce their emissions and invest in cleaner ways of doing business. Under the EU scheme, the price will go up because over time, the number of permits will be reduced.

By offering people outside the scheme (like you and me) the chance to buy credits on the ETS, Carbon Retirement reduces the number of permits on the market, so polluting becomes more expensive more quickly. Which should mean that emissions are reduced. Which is a good thing. Their site is available at: www.carbonretirement.com