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Recently, we created a Green Committee at work. Even though we are an environmental organization, we realized that we could be doing a better job at a few things. For example, why doesn’t the office have a green bin, even though the county has a composting program for green waste?

A few people in the office asked us to specifically look at carbon offsets, and whether we recommended purchasing them for air travel. The New York Times published an article on the subject last month, titled Paying More for Flights Eases Guilt, Not Emissions. Their conclusion:

Yahoo and the House of Representatives decided to stop buying offsets, deciding their money was better spent investing in energy efficiency improvements.

Here is a quick list of some of the available information and guidance on carbon offsets from a friend at Friends of the Earth:

• Clean Air Cool Planet was one of the first to come out with a Consumer’s Guide to Offsets. People still use it a lot, although it is getting dated.
• The Suzuki Foundation has a newer 2009 Carbon Offset Guide for the Canadian market, but which should be helpful for US groups too.
• My grad alma mater Tufts published research on carbon offsets in an April 2007 paper. It is a couple of years old now, but still informative. Mostly oriented towards air travel, the authors rate both carbon footprint calculators and offset programs.
• GreenAmerica has some helpful tips: don’t buy tree-planting offsets (too difficult to ensure permanent sequestration); or from exchanges like the Chicago Climate Exchange (puts your money into carbon commodities, rather than directly funding projects; DriveNeutral, in SF is one of those)
• For something really different, instead of donating money so that your carbon footprint can be “neutralized” tit-for-tat, you may consider donating money to grassroots groups working against fossil fuels. San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network has one of these non-offsets programs.