We, su-re.co, are making portable biogas digesters to provide green energy to farmers and reduce greenhouse gas emission.
We heard that an existing investor was concerned about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and I took a moment to reflect on his concerns. The investor is concerned that emission credits can be re-sold at a high price. They are also worried that the activities taking place in the market for emission credit may be PR projects and not a real market. That's true. But this is a concern that would not be necessary if it were not for the emissions trading market, where emissions credits created by certification companies are sold through emissions trading companies.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions does not necessarily mean trading the credits for those emissions. If people are willing to pay for the greenhouse gas reductions we make from biogas, why not just continue to consume the emissions reductions in the same way they would drink blockchain-verified fair trade coffee? I talked to an environmental friend this weekend who told me that even though people don't like the term carbon offset, there is a massive increase in demand for people to donate to tree planting when they fly or buy things. Sometimes they don't even use the word carbon offset; they use words like Nature Base Solution. Also, consumers don't expect to be able to re-sell the offsets they have donated. So we can continue to use this mechanism to sell our emissions.
The most important thing is that we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and if we have done that, we don't need to re-trade the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And if they are not re-traded, then there is no problem with companies offsetting carbon in PR projects, as long as the carbon offsetting in PR projects is certified and the reduction is made correctly. The problem is that the middleman between certification and trading is very high because it is tied to one person who has the authority to do so.
Carbon offsets that are verified by our blockchain and networked flow meters, without any certification company or emissions trading company, should be very cheap. Still, I don't think the big companies that are doing carbon offsetting as a PR exercise will be interested in what we are doing. Because they just need proof that they are "doing something to reduce emissions", rather than the number of emissions. At the moment, I think these big companies are more likely to buy the trust from the certification companies than the verification from the blockchain.
In summary, I think it would be better to target carbon offsets at groups that are genuinely interested in climate change rather than big companies that think of carbon offsets as a PR business. Eventually, the times will turn and big companies will join our activities. For example, this year, we have members of a well known environmental investment group donating to our biogas project. One of the reasons for this is that they hope that su-re.co will use the money they donate to reduce greenhouse gas emissions even more. It was my personal trust that I would do this properly, but we will be reporting on the use of biogas through a network of flow meters. It would be good to start working with a group that cares about how the money they pay for carbon offsets is spent.