On Taking Our Family Carbon Neutral
On Friday, April 30th, 2021, I tweeted the following.
Though small in the grand scheme of things, it felt terrific to be in a position to do something about my family’s impact on the world.
Of the handful of tweets I have made, this is the one that garnered the most responses. The first question asked was, ‘How do you know that your carbon offsets are real?’ and secondly, ‘What is a carbon offset anyway?’ The goal of this short blog is to answer those questions.
Firstly, What is a carbon offset?
The way I described this to my children was as follows. Every day we wake up and do things. They could be activities we do such as drive the car to school, putting on the washing machine, playing video games (a lot of this happens), or watching TV. Everything we do consumes energy, and that consumption of energy releases CO2 into the atmosphere. There are a few ways to combat this. We can choose to do less of an energy-consuming thing (fewer computer games that didn’t go down well). We can change the energy-consuming item into a less consuming entity (switch the petrol car for an electric vehicle). Perhaps we don’t do something, for example, fly on an airplane to go on holiday. Finally, we could change our energy provider to one based on renewable energy.
All of the above are entirely reasonable suggestions and would reduce our carbon footprint. We do what we can, but it isn’t going to impact our baseline carbon emissions. At the end of the day, we need to cook, heat our home, and do like our video games. That’s where carbon offsets come in. A carbon offset is a contract with a third party ( typically a company ) to take action, such as planting trees to remove a quantity of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. There’s a fancy word for this; we are paying to sequester carbon dioxide. Shortly we will see advances in direct sequestration through systems that will draw co2 from the atmosphere and convert it into products. This development is what the Carbon XPrize is all about
with specific prizes such as One Hundred Million dollars for the team that — “…demonstrates a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes removed per year; model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year; and show a pathway to achieving a scale of gigatonnes per year in future.”
These are in the future, but you can buy carbon offsets today as we did. A typical UK family is estimated to emit 50 metric tonnes of CO2 per year.
You can dig in and get a far more accurate estimate.
For our family, this year, we chose to offset 50 metric tonnes of CO2. In the future, we will likely calculate a more accurate number.
How did we do this offset? We went online and purchased offsets. In our case, we went to
A few days later, we received our certificate in an email detailing what we had purchased.
Other alternative companies we identified while researching
How do we know that our offsets are real?
Pachama and a growing group of companies turn to AI to analyze satellite photographs to get accurate estimates of forests and the new growth in those forests.
“Pachama uses machine learning models to answer questions about forests. For example, we model the last 30 years of a forest’s history to infer what would have happened to the forest without a carbon project. And we use radar data to monitor forest canopy and catch deforestation as it may be happening.”
Reforestation and carbon offsets are becoming big business.
So we know because we went to a company whose business model has been verified and is committed to improving the environment through carbon offsets.
For some more formal definitions and jumping-off points, Wikipedia is an excellent place to start.
We are excited as a family to have been able to offset our emissions and plan on continuing to do so in the future.
