Carbon Neutral Household Operations in 2012

In my personal quest for my family to be carbon neutral, 2012 was a significant step forward.  In 2011, we reached the point where our house itself did not require any fossil fuels to operate (by using wood heat and commercial renewable power).  In 2012, we undertook an energy audit and resulting house efficiency work to make a major reduction in the amount of electricity we use (thanks to Snug Planet). I'll quantify this when the heating season is over but we are now pretty much using no electricity for heat, relying entirely on wood for that.  Electricity usage for appliances and hot water should also have been reduced substantially.

Also, having found a carbon offset provider I like (Finger Lakes Climate Fund), I was able to offset all our personal air travel, car usage, and landscaping machinery fuel usage, resulting in overall carbon-neutral household operations in 2012 - for the first time ever.

Does this mean we are environmental saints with nothing left to do?  Absolutely not, nothing could be further from the truth.  My major goal in 2013 is to get a solar installation, which should mean we will generate most or all of our electricity on site.  Beyond that, I'd like to move to electric and/or plugin-hybrid cars to reduce our reliance on offsets.  The house could be made far more efficient still if we did a deep-energy retrofit when we replace the siding, and if we replaced the windows with more efficient (eg non-Victorian) ones.  All these are steps we can take entirely on our own in the next few years.

Looking to less easy fixes over the longer term: we buy many goods and services from suppliers who are not themselves carbon-neutral.  As carbon neutral alternatives become available, I would very much like to select those where practical.  Also, I work for a mainstream company who presently have no concern for their carbon footprint (eg, they won't reimburse carbon offsets for my work-related travel - I asked).  That too is something I'd like to improve on in the long term.

Still, it feels good to have gotten as far as we have.

Finger Lakes Climate Fund

Like many people with concerns about climate change, I am in the process of making changes in my own life to reduce my carbon emissions.  But, also like many such people, I am trying to do so while not creating chaos for my family, and limited both by how far along in the process I've gotten, as well as the available technical options.

Two big areas where I can't immediately eliminate emissions are car travel (where we will likely go electric in the next couple of years, but aren't there yet) and air travel (which won't be feasible to eliminate so quickly).  We'll keep working on these items, but in the meantime it's attractive to look at offsetting the emissions rather than doing nothing about them.

I should stress that I don't think there's much virtue in taking no action at all to reduce one's own emissions and then offsetting everything.  But I do think offsets potentially have value as part of an overall sincere strategy to reduce emissions.  However, a central worry is the quality of the offsets: there are lots of horror stories of tree plantations that cause environmental damage, or forests that are planted and then allowed to die, or factories being built in China to produce greenhouse gases just so they could destroy the resulting product and then claim the offset.  Developing countries in general tend to be corrupt and disorganized and it seems likely that offset schemes based there will run into all manner of problems.  So the whole offset area has gotten something of a bad name.

For that reason, when I heard about the Finger Lakes Climate Fund, which promises to offset emissions with local projects in my own region I was very attracted to the idea.  Because the projects are local, and I understand my area, I felt it was likely that I'd be able to assess the quality of the offsets.  The main concern is what is called additionality: are the projects things that genuinely wouldn't have happened if you hadn't ponied up your cash?

In addition, since the fund is run by a small local non-profit, I thought it was likely that I'd be able to get reasonable quality information about how everything is run, and satisfy myself that it was legitimate.  That proved to be correct: the Executive Director, Gay Nicholson, sat down with me for an hour this week and walked me through their process.  This is what I learned.