The Offset Program

In order to make best use of your donations, we had to find a good carbon-offset program to invest in. With so many bad ones out there, we had to try to separate the wheat from the chaff.

We turned to The David Suzuki Foundation for guidance. Their website offers the following advice:

"Ideally, offsets should be purchased on a contractual basis from new projects as they are being developed. This provides assurance that one’s offset purchase is contributing to the adoption of additional clean technologies, rather than funding existing projects. If new project offsets are not available, then the next best thing is a project that was developed to explicitly counter increases in greenhouse gas emissions, such as a renewable energy project developed by a fossil fuel powered electric utility."

It was The David Suzuki Foundation who turned us on to Offsetters. A project of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization at the University of Oxford and the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, Offsetters offers individuals the opportunity to invest in effective and innovative carbon offset projects.

The Offsetters project selected for the Great Canadian Carbon Offset 2006 will be the replacement of a natural gas heating system with a ground source heat pump system in a local public school. Ground source heat pumps (GSHP) are a particularly effective greenhouse gas (GHG) control measure locally because electricity generation in British Columbia contributes so little to GHG emissions already. To learn more about how GSHPs work, click here.

Offsetters' partner in this project is Earth Source Energy Inc.

Offsetters will not be taking any overhead, and the cost per metric ton of CO₂ offset will be CAD$15.