Report Guides Carbon Offset Customers

The study examined the carbon offset programs of 30 companies and organizations, ranking each based on seven criteria. While it doesn’t provide actual scores or rankings, the report names eight providers that score higher than five out of a possible ten points. Of those top-tier performers, four make carbon offsets readily available to U.S. customers: DrivingGreen™, from AgCert International, LLC; the Climate Trust; NativeEnergy, LLC; and MyClimate™ from Sustainable Travel International. The other four are Atmosfair (Germany); the CarbonNeutral Company, Ltd. (U.K.); Climate Care (U.K.), and Co2Balance (U.K.). Conspicuously missing from this list is TerraPass Inc., in a prominent partnership with Expedia, Inc. to offset airline travel; and the Leonardo Academy’s Cleaner and Greener®, which has been a major source of offsets for U.S. Green Building Council and its annual Greenbuild conference.

Among the criteria used by the Clean Air–Cool Planet report, the most heavily weighted is how the provider evaluates the quality of its offsets. The report defines quality largely in terms of