internet

Selling Carbon Credits on eBay—Solution or Scam?

Marcus — Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Buying and selling carbon emissions as a means to lower your carbon footprint is a trend that has significantly grown in popularity in recent years. Corporations frequently purchase carbon credits in order to offset high emissions levels, helping the carbon trade blossom into a multimillion-dollar industry. For the environmentally conscious individual, however, for whom trading carbon on the corporate level is not a feasible option, there is another alternative: eBay.

Here’s how it works: small farms and, essentially, anyone who takes the initiative to plant trees can sell carbon offsets equivalent to the amount of metric tons of CO2 consumed by the number of trees that have been planted (typically, one tree will consume between 3 and 4 metric tons over the course of its lifetime). So, let’s say you sell one tree’s CO2 consumption for twenty bucks. If each tree costs about fifty cents to plant, plus about another fifty or so cents to mail some sort of carbon certificate to your buyer, you’re making about a $19 profit before eBay and PayPal fees. That’s an enormous gain. So, by just planting some trees and advertising on eBay, you can conceivably make some serious bank, and help combat global warming in the process. Sounds great, right?

Well, not exactly. With so many people eager to join the emissions trading frenzy (and hopefully make a quick buck in the process), quality control is difficult to monitor. eBay posts promise certificates guaranteeing the authenticity of the carbon sale, but who can definitively verify whether offsets from the same tree have been sold multiple times, or that trees are being planted in proportion to sold credits at all? Further, carbon credit vending on the corporate scale is easier to regulate due to its magnitude and relative uniformity on a global level. In the private sector, however, things get more complicated. Carbon credits can be sold for as much as any SUV-driving, gas-guzzling citizen with a desire to green their life is willing to pay. Since carbon trading is a relatively new phenomenon, there is no standard in place to prevent people from getting ripped off.

In short, while buying and selling carbon credits online is certainly a novel idea, if you’re going to try it out, do so with caution. You’re probably better off just planting some trees in your backyard.

Want to learn more about carbon credits?

How to Measure and Price Carbon Credits

Carbon Footprints

The Quest for the Perfect Carbon Calculator

How Much Do Carbon Credits Cost?

This Magic Moment

ckane — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

Earth Moment is another simple, free change you can make to your everyday routine--in this case, shopping online--to help the planet. The site is a portal leading to established online retailers (including green stores), which pay commissions to Earth Moment for every purchase you make. Half the commission is then invested back into the planet (into renewable energy, energy efficiency, and reforestation projects) via Carbonfund.org.

The most exciting wedding-related category is Travel & Hotels, which links to Hotels.com, Hotwire, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Budget Rent-a-Car, Spa Finder, and my personal favorite resource for budget airfare, Kayak.com, among others.

Why not mention the site in your wedding invite or link to it on your wedding website, for the guests who have to travel to your wedding? And when it's all over, if you must fly to your honeymoon and you can't afford to offset the whole thing, using Earth Moment at least is a baby step. But there's no reason to go jetting around Europe; another of the portal's affiliates is Railpass.com. Even buying the Zagat restaurant guide for your honeymoon destination through Earth Moment will generate a wee bit of carbon offset.

The oddest option on there is a private jet service, which if you book it through Earth Moment, yeilds a donation of $150.

Earth Moment was started by Ogden Publications, who put out Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, and Natural Home magazines.

Etsy's Handmade Weddings Offer More Green Wedding Porn

ckane — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 01:00:00 -0400

I've already mentioned the online craft site Etsy as a resource for recycled, upcycled, and otherwise-eco wedding favors and supplies. But green and DIY wedding planners have been abuzz this week over the launch of Etsy's Handmade Wedding Series, highlighting different crafty weddings and wedding skills. So far on the Earth-friendly front, the series has highlighted a recycled and low-budget wedding, vintage wedding fashions, and eco tips with Meghan from Portovert.

Part of this whole nontraditional wedding planning seems to be looking around at other atypical weddings for ideas to pillage or adapt. I already saw one idea I want to steal from Etsy's profile of the recycled wedding: using Bambu single-use biodegradable place settings for the food, made from sustainable bamboo. One super-amazing fun resource for such wedding porn is Offbeat Bride. (Just beware when you're taking inspiration from many scources of creating what's known as a Frankenwedding--a hodgepodge of too many different elements and themes)

This also marks the return of Etsy's Alchemy feature, where you can post to ask for a specific item you'd like to have custom-made, such as a wedding dress or invites on recycled paper. Alchemy works like eBay's Want It Now feature, only you list your ideal price and then potential crafters bid on the item you want to have made.

And now that you're about to get sucked into both Etsy and Offbeat Bride, good luck getting anything else done ever again.Or at least until your wedding is over.

A Wearin' of the Green...With Sexy Results

ckane — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:01:05 -0400

At this time of year it may seem like there's corned beef meating up every perfectly good pot of potatoes, and at the St. Patrick's Day parades, green has a much different definition than the eco meaning that's been taking over lately. If you're looking for someone with similar values to share your Guinness, and you've exhausted the options on Facebook, MySpace, and more generalized online dating options, never fear because the Internet is here.

The specialized dating service I've known of the longest is VeggieDate with 16,000 ads of lonely hearts identifying as Adventist, Buddhist, macrobiotic, and raw foodists, among other categorizations.

However, Green Singles is probably the much older dating service; it's been kicking around since 1985. The vegetarian owner/operators also run the new site Veggie Love.

There's also Earth Wise Singles, Green Thumb Dating, Vegan Passions, Green Passions, Veggie Romance, Veggie Singles (a UK-based site), and Veggie Connection.

That should be enough to keep you busy. The abundance of resources make it seem a little more easy being green in love, and a little harder to sort through them all. Some of the sites are free and some for fee. I'm assuming there's overlap in candidates on these sites, but some of that narrowing-down process is up to you, fearless dater. The Internet can't do everything.

Note: This writer has not used any of these services (she and her fiance met on regular old MySpace), and can't vouch for them or their percentage of creeps vs hots. I'm just puttin' this list out there on an FYI basis.

Let There Be Paper-Free RSVP

ckane — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:44:59 -0400

Even people who don't concern themselves with recycling or conservation take notice when they get a single wedding invite envelope stuffed with a puzzling collection of cards and other envelopes. One way to cut down on that wasteful tradition and not down so many trees is to eliminate the RSVP card and envelope altogether.

Numerous services already provide wedding websites, but a lot of their designs are...well, "traditional." Let's put it that way. They tend to look wedding-y, which, if you're looking into green weddings, might not be your thing. It's definitely not mine, so I'm sharing the best source for wedsites I've found so far: the very design-y Nearlyweds.

For a flat rate of $49, the engaged couple gets two years of a wedsite, with blogging capability, photo sharing for after the events, and online RSVP for multiple events (the wedding reception, the rehearsal dinner, etc.). And in addition to other fun stuff, like a function to share your how-you-met story on the site, the site designs are modern and appealing. If you go the printed invites route, Nearlyweds works with a handful of invitation designers, some who use recyled paper, although not all do just yet.

(I also have a slight issue with Nearlyweds' example couple's names; they're the same as my brother's and my names. Eww.)

From The Industrial Revolution To The Internet

tdupuy — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

I guess you could consider Luddites to be environmentalists. As you could the Amish. Or the Unabomber. Yeah, you could forsake all modern comforts - live off the grid - grow your own food and bask in your lack of impact on the environment. You could not have a cell phone, computer or zippers. That is within your rights as a citizen. Go on. Knock yourself out.

I’m not going to be able to do that. No. Like most people, I am going to have to live in a city. I’m going to have to have some kind of transportation. I’m going to have to have some communication devices. And - in order to write for this site - I’m going to have to have a computer.

So, the question is: does that make me a hypocrite?

The answer may be less complicated than the question. The way I see it - technology was at one time the arch nemesis of all things green. At least it was around the time of the Industrial Revolution. It got even worse after WWII, when plastics and processed foods came into fashion. Then the 80’s and 90’s saw disposable everything. Things then got even sloppier.

The economy trumped eco-friendly. The apogee to this in my mind was the rise of fast food, oil exec windfall profits and the US opting out of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these things happened in the early part of this decade (if you can think of a name for this decade, please email it to me).

Now there is a consumer cry for sustainability. The economy can also push eco-friendly as it turns out. Today, I would say that most people who consider themselves to be environmentalists are not Luddite types. They are actually like myself, a (excuse this) hybrid of higher tech and lower impact hopefuls. Technology is looking like the way forward. Cleaner ways to live sure existed for Cro-Magnon, and there are certainly 3rd World countries that produce less garbage than the US. But finding a balance between the two extremes is what’s in store for the future.

The one example that I think about all the time is how much paper has been saved since the advent of the internet. When I was a kid, I got stationary as a gift. Could you imagine? Who owns stationary? Think of all the forests that have been saved by the internet. The letters that are now emails. The newspapers that are now websites. The catalogs that are now online stores. The CD’s that are now MP3s. The junk mail that’s now – well, I still get junk mail (and spam on top of that!) Think of all that waste and land fill that has been saved just by the world wide web. Perhaps the future isn’t so bleak after all…