During the Copenhagen Climate Summit, carbon offsets are a topic for discussion. Carbon offests are “essentially a service whereby the purchaser pays someone else to create greenhouse gas reductions on his or her behalf” (The Suzuki Foundation). Since the inception of the Kyoto Protocol, they have been a popular mechanism to encourage awareness about climate change, and to reduce carbon emissions. However, according the US News “officials [at Copenhagen] will be considering which types of offset programs work and can actually be enforced,” because “there’s a big potential for fraud here.” To date, there is no formal regulation of carbon offsets, and there are a number of concerns with their use.
Groups that promote action on climate change have long argued that carbon offsets can “promot[e] innovation, help[] to make clean energy projects more economically viable, and allow[] people to take responsibility for their entire carbon footprint, including emissions that can’t be effectively reduced.” However, these same organizations make it VERY clear that “offsets are not a replacement for direct action by individuals, businesses or organizations to reduce their own carbon footprints” (Suzuki Foundation). Carbon offsets are only a solution after businesses and individuals have made as many changes as possible to reduce their carbon footprints.
Unfortunately, experience has shown that carbon offsets don’t actually encourage behavior changes. In fact, carbon offsets are beginning to be seen as a way for people and businesses to “assuage their guilt” by buying a “get out of jail free card.”
Yet many Web Hosting companies and data centers are building “green” marketing campaigns based on the fact that they are purchasing carbon offsets, without providing any evidence that they have actually made efforts to reduce the carbon they produce. This is, in my opinion, greenwashing, and makes it hard for businesses to find truly green hosting solutions.
About Brian Fry
Brian is a driving force behind the development of Canada's first truly "green" datacenter, RackForce's GigaCenter in Kelowna, BC. This facility, engineered with input from IBM's Big Green team and powered by a hydro-electricity, delivers large-scale, technologically-advanced infrastructure for disaster recovery, colocation, and cloud/virtualization computing demands, and it sets the standard for green datacenters.
Brian launched his first technology company in Vancouver in 1985, and spent the Internet boom years in California. In 1997, Brian and his family left the traffic and pollution of California behind and returned to the safe, clean and green interior of BC. Brian became a partner in PowerLink Internet Services, which quickly grew into one of the largest ISPs in British Columbia, and was sold to Internet Direct in 1999. A short time later, Brian co-founded IPWorld Networks with Tim Dufour. This established a successful partnership, and in 2001, Brian and Tim co-founded RackForce. Brian and Tim have created a company that has significant business relationships with IBM and Microsoft, and that provides environmentally sustainable Dynamic Datacenter Services to a world-wide customer base. Brian is an outdoor enthusiast, and his passion for skiing and hiking reinforces his commitment to Green IT.
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