.

Orion’s Carbon Offset Program

Shedding and Offsetting

Working with NativeEnergy, Orion magazine, the Orion Grassroots Network and The Orion Society have offset 100 percent of our estimated carbon dioxide production from 2008, which we calculated after the fact and offset in 2009 (we did this last year for 2007, finding it more accurate than projecting our footprint).

This year we have expanded our measurement of our footprint: we are offsetting carbon produced by the creation, publication, and distribution of Orion and the paper it’s printed on; staff commuting and travel to events; conference facility usage; office waste generation; and office heating here at 187 Main in Great Barrington. (We already purchase renewable electricity for our office through New England GreenStart, a program offered by our local utility.) Our determination to more completely measure our footprint, along with a larger print run for the magazine, increased our measured carbon footprint by 86 tons over the previous year.

NativeEnergy matches carbon producers with carbon-offset projects that require subsidy in order to happen. Through NativeEnergy, we are funding part of four energy efficiency or renewable energy projects. The money The Orion Society provides helps pay for renewable energy credits issued by these projects. These are donated by NativeEnergy to the nonprofit Clean Air–Cool Planet, which then retires them from the market.

“NativeEnergy connects us to specific projects that are offsetting carbon in the same manner we are creating it—for instance, a lot of our footprint is related to shipping and travel; Cascade Sierra Solutions retrofits long-haul trucks to make them more efficient,” says Hal Clifford, executive editor of Orion and our in-house “walk the talk” manager. “This doesn’t make any practical difference—carbon is carbon—but there’s an appealing symmetry to it.”

Orion’s 2008 carbon footprint (276 short tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent) is being offset in 2009 through:

—Cascades Sierra Solutions, which funds retrofits on owner-operator tractor-trailers, including installation of auxiliary power units (which can be run in lieu of the engine at times), fairings, and more efficient tires and wheels. Unlike large corporate fleets, small owner-operators often lack time and capital to make such upgrades.

—A 99-megawatt wind project in St. Leon, Manitoba, which is building 63 Vestas turbines on 51 family farms, providing jobs, rental income and revenue-sharing to farmers while reducing coal-fired electricity generation in Manitoba and the Upper Midwest.

—An anaerobic digester on the Mains family dairy farm in Newville, Pennsylvania, which captures methane from manure and uses it in an on-site turbine to generate electricity. This is a particularly powerful offset, since methane is a greenhouse gas more than 20 times as potent as CO2 on a per-pound basis.

—The Colonie Landfill Abatement Project in Colonie, New York, which installed 4.8 megawatts of generating capacity at the landfill to convert methane to electricity on a 24/7 basis.

Carbon offsetting is presently an unregulated market and, consequently, some offset programs have been criticized for their lack of verifiable “additionality”—that is, proof that the purchase of an offset actually removed a certain amount of carbon dioxide from the pollution stream that otherwise would have been emitted. NativeEnergy uses third-party certification to demonstrate additionality.

For more information about any of these projects, click here.