In her first major speech to Parliament in 2007, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark laid down an ambitious plan of making New Zealand the world’s first greenhouse gas (GHG)-neutral country.
Among measures Clark announced include a plan that clean-burning biofuels must account for 3.4 percent of fuel sold in the country by 2012 to replace gasoline and diesel; that all 47 government agencies should be using energy efficient transport, recycled paper and environmentally-friendly products and buildings; and a campaign to help households save energy and cut waste.
“I believe we can aspire to be carbon neutral in our economy and way of life,” Clark stressed, although no timetable was given to achieve the goal.
Indeed. And Kiwis can hasten that transformation by becoming carbon neutral themselves.
Just What Is Becoming Carbon Neutral, and How Does One Go About It? Carbon neutrality refers to energy policies and practices that effectively result in zero net emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) which contribute significantly to global warming. Any effort to help reduce these gases will offset the effects of global warming.
Carbon neutrality encompasses a whole program which includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, researching and utilizing renewable energy resources and offsetting whatever emissions one cannot avoid producing. At the personal level, becoming carbon neutral requires a deep awareness of one’s impact to the environment of his or her daily activities.
To Become Carbon Neutral, One Can Do It In Two Major Ways: (1) By reducing one’s own carbon emission by becoming energy efficient and deliberately avoiding activities that emit carbon gases and (2) by offsetting whatever is produced by some carbon-reducing activities somewhere around the globe.
The second method, offsetting, can be realized by avoided emissions and carbon sequestration. One can avoid emitting GHG by using less fossil fuel and switching to renewable sources such as geothermal which is locally abundant, for power generation.
Carbon sequestration involves removing an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it for a given time. Proposals on carbon sequestration range from capturing the carbon dioxide emissions of coal power plants (such as the Huntly coal power station), researching on how forests absorb GHG and improving pasture lands management to increase soil uptake of these gases.
Examples of carbon offsetting projects are the following: Solar power (providing for own power using solar panels to avoid buying power from the grid), wind power (putting wind turbines instead of fuel-based generating plants) , hydroelectric power, fuel efficiency, fuel substitution (switching to a fuel which emits less carbon), co-generation (generating electricity and heat from one source), efficient lighting (replacing incandescent lamps with compact fluorescent lamps), materials switching (replacing input materials for industrial processes to those with less carbon emission), construction of green buildings (which are energy and materials efficient), green transport (using LPG as fuel and driving hybrid cars), utilization of industrial waste (e.g., recycling), biomass power generation (burning farm residue to generate power), reforestation and efficient pasture management (e.g., inter-cropping with plants that enhance the carbon storage capacity of the soil).
Green Energy Projects Large-scale offsetting activities normally arise in energy or environmental protection projects implemented through the so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol. The mechanism is essentially trading an institution’s excess carbon emissions with another’s surplus to lead to a net zero sums.
Under this mechanism, these green projects generate so-called carbon credits in the form of Carbon Emission Reduction (CER) certificates which are duly certified by independent accreditation bodies. The certificates can then be traded in a carbon market such as the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), the Primary CDM market and the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCE) – the last being the largest voluntary carbon market (see below).
The generation of CERs makes financing green energy projects in many developing countries possible which otherwise could not have been viable.
In 2007, the volume of carbon trading in the regulated markets totaled 2,918 metric tons of CO2 equivalent ( the other greenhouse gases are converted to equivalent CO2) with a value of US$ 66.1 billion, up from 1,702 mt CO2eq worth US$ 40.1 billion in 2006 (Source: Ecosystem Marketplace, New Carbon Finance, World Bank ). Europe and Japan have been the largest buyers and China the largest seller.
The purchasers range from corporations with substantial carbon footprints that are looking to minimize their financial risks ahead of tightening regulation to green investment funds.
The CERs from smaller projects like rural wind power and co-generation can be traded in a voluntary carbon market which is still small but is growing at a much faster rate than its regulated brethren. In 2007, the global voluntary market was worth US$ 331 million, sharply up from US$ 96.7 million the previous year.