EQUICLIMATE CO2 offsetting

EBICo is a not-for-profit social enterprise. We offer fairer prices to all domestic energy consumers in the UK. Generally, the poor pay the highest prices for electricity and gas as supply companies charge premium rates to households that use prepayment meters (see Poor pay £1000 more).

By contrast, our tariffs (EQUIGAS and EQUIPOWER) have the same flat-rate irrespective of the way customers pay. This means cheaper prices for low income households and fairer prices, that don’t depend on charging more to the least able to pay, for everyone. We offer EQUICLIMATE offsetting to reduce the future impact of consumers’ essential energy use such as heating homes and cooking food.

Climate change is real, happening now and caused, in substantial part, by the human appetite for burning fossil fuel. Given current levels of atmospheric CO2 our climate will continue to change no matter what we do. However, reducing further increases in atmospheric CO2 in the near-term (the next 10 years) will enable humanity to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Offsetting has a role both in helping to educate consumers about responsible energy use and climate change and in reducing near-term CO2 emissions. The priorities for us in developing our EQUICLIMATE offset service were that it should be robust and auditable, result in near-term emissions reductions and be focused on where the problem of atmospheric CO2 emissions is created – in the developed world.

We, therefore, decided to use the EU’s CO2 ‘cap and trade’ system (the EU ETS) as the tool for our offsetting. When a customer buys an offset from us, we aggregate it, with the offset purchases of other customers, and use the funds to buy and retire allowances under the ETS (called EUAs). Because we are permanently removing these EUAs from circulation, the industries covered by the ETS have to reduce the amount of CO2 they produce by this amount or face heavy fines.

EQUICLIMATE offsetting, results in near-term emissions reductions (Phase 2 of the EUETS runs from 2008 until 2012) in a major contributor to climate change (the EU industrial base). And because we retire EUAs to tighten the EU emissions cap, concerns with ‘additionality’ (would the emissions reductions have happened anyway even without the offset purchase?), problems assessing project impact and reliability, and worries about double-counting, all of which dog the offset market, just don’t apply to EQUICLIMATE.

www.equiclimate.org