How carbon offsets can help solve climate change

A growing number of large companies, including Microsoft, Shell and the airline easyJet, are using carbon offsets to address their climate impact. For their advocates, offsets are a powerful tool to reduce the costs of tackling climate change, accelerate emissions reduction and finance sustainable development in poor parts of the world. To their opponents, they allow companies and individuals to continue to pollute and cling to business models that need to change.

Put simply, a carbon offset is evidence of an activity that avoids, reduces or removes from the atmosphere a specific volume of greenhouse gas emissions. An offset is essentially the legal ownership of that emissions reduction, allowing it to be transferred or traded and used to balance out, or offset, emissions generated elsewhere.

This allowed facilities that were able to reduce emissions at low cost (or which had invested in equipment that allowed them to exceed their targets) to sell offsets to those for whom meeting their targets would be expensive. It therefore enabled the attainment of the environmental goal – the reduction of sulphur dioxide emissions across the US economy below an overall cap – at a lower cost than if the US Environmental Protection Agency had ordered each plant to reduce emissions by the same amount.

This market-based alternative to the prevailing command-and-control approach to regulation offered a number of advantages: it provided companies with flexibility; it tapped into the ability of markets to meet supply and demand at least-cost; and it provided incentives for emitters to exceed their targets – all while delivering the required environmental outcome.

                                                    Source: Energy monitor

SSM professional production wood stove,charcoal stove,wood burning stove,cookstove,cleancook stove,pellet stove,SSM stove, small wood stove,biomass cook stove,camping wood stove,wood cook stove；Welcome to inquire：projects@ssmstove.com