It’s no secret that air travel is hard on the environment; but it’s also one of the key ingredients to a robust global economy. The World Intellectual Property Organization says that air travel accounts for 35 percent of goods traded internationally (by value) and over 40 percent of international tourism. On the upside, aviation generates 5.5 million jobs and contributes over $400 billion to global GDP. On the downside, aviation also accounts for roughly 13 percent of global transport emissions and 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
Greenopia recently released a comprehensive ranking of the top ten Carbon Offset companies for mitigating personal climate impact produced by flying, driving, and from household energy consumption. Topping the list are TerraPass and EnPalo. Carbon Offsets have been under fire in recent years due to questions surrounding their overall effectiveness and transparency to the public. With over a billion tons of offsets being purchased each year, consumers are looking for a company they can trust. The entire carbon offset ranking results are at Greenopia.
The Princeton Review, today released its second annual Green Ratings of colleges. In this measure of how environmentally friendly the institutions are on a scale of 60 to 99, the company tallied its Green Ratings for 697 institutions based on data it collected from the colleges in 2008-09 concerning their environmentally related policies, practices, and academic offerings. The Princeton Review also named 15 colleges to its “2010 Green Rating Honor Roll” – a list that salutes the institutions that received the highest possible score – 99 – in this year’s rating tallies.
The market for voluntarily offsetting carbon emissions doubled between 2007 and 2008 to reach $700m. With forecasts suggesting that the market could double again to 2012 this new sector is now attracting the attention of more serious investors and traders, as well as more companies looking to offset their emissions. But despite all the excitement around these projections there has been no systematic analysis of where the demand in this new market will actually come from, if indeed at all. Nobody has stopped to ask the simple questions “why do organizations voluntarily offset their emissions?” “how much value do they get out of it”, and “when does carbon setting work and when doesn’t it work?“
The intern should address how Toyola and Katene can completely saturate the efficient stove markets in Ghana and Mali. his will require an analysis of private sector industry growth potential. More specifically, E+Co hopes to leverage Toyola’s and Katene’s organizational strengths and anticipated carbon revenues to quadruple sales over the coming year. Students will be asked to identify barriers to industry growth and propose solutions to overcome those barriers. This could include, but should not be limited to investigations around mechanization, broadened distribution channels, marketing, industry growth bottlenecks, pricing sensitivity analyses, etc.
Over at JustMeans, Dave Stanis, of the Campbell Soup Company, speculated that based on current trends, carbon accounting will be a growing, in demand, career specialty. He recommends taking classes in carbon accounting. I think he is on to something because Groom Energy has declared 2009 the Year of Enterprise Carbon Accounting and a recent Greenhouse Gas Management Institute study revealed that the industry is suffering from a profound skills shortage. For those of you who have never heard of carbon accounting, it is the accounting undertaken to measure the amount of carbon dioxide equivalents that will not be released into the atmosphere as a result of Flexible Mechanisms projects under the Kyoto Treaty.
