I not only fly my big twin quite a lot, but I also fly commercially all over the world and the zeitgeist persuaded me that I should be carbon offsetting.
I did a fair amount of diligence and decided that the best recipient was this scheme. Their bang per buck is considerably higher than other schemes.
I am not writing this to be “holier than thou”. You decide if you want to offset carbon. I am just trying to save you some effort if you decide that that is what you want to do.
Funnily enough, given the news-cycle, I’d just done the sums. If they’re correct, the emission is supposed to be about 2 kg per litre of gasoline, so the cost of the order of 1p per litre at £5 per ton of CO2.
We did our sums and decided to offset 53 tonnes per annum.
However, the cost of offset varies wildly to lower figures than you have quoted to much higher. If you start to do some diligence, you begin to realise that some of the schemes are complete rip-offs.
For example, you can buy domestic renewable energy, but that is a complete con, because the electricity is already being produced and you are not actually removing any carbon from the atmosphere, nor really preventing any new CO2 being added.
The best thing to do is to plant new trees in places where they would not otherwise be planted. There are several places that that can be done, but some of them are more expensive per tree than others (meaning more trees per financial donation), others are not well audited and you can see your money going directly into local warlords or government official pockets.
But the Kenyan scheme is audited and heavily scrutinised, and the government is relatively stable and uncorrupt (compared to other African states) and has the added advantage of providing jobs to people in the developing world.
The cost of 53 tonnes is (just over) £500, so roughly double your quote, but almost certainly reflects much better the amount of CO2 being absorbed.
My club is also carbon offsetting. We currently pay SEK 0:50 (about EUR 0:05) per litre for a Gold Standard and UN certified project (SEK 225/EUR 22:50 per tonne CO2). This is less than half of bookworm’s computation…?
Airborne_Again wrote:
This is less than half of bookworm’s computation…?
I think you slipped a decimal point. You’re paying almost 5 times what I suggested.
2 kg per litre of gasoline
How is that possible?
>>How is that possible?
Because the oxygen of CO2 comes from the atmosphere, not the fuel. So The CO2 is more than the fuel’s weight
bookworm wrote:
I think you slipped a decimal point. You’re paying almost 5 times what I suggested.
You’re right…. I slipped a decimal point in my comparison but not in the figure of what we pay. As Timothy noted costs vary widely depending on the particular project. Also, when you buy small amounts I expect the cost to depend much on the overhead (and profit margin…) of the retailer. Anyway, I don’t find SEK 0:50/litre excessive. The fuel price typically fluctuates more than twice that amount in one year. It amounts to less than 1% of the rental cost in my club.
