Carbon offsets

Many of you may already know this but I just found out about it a couple of weeks ago. The Provost wants to create a new college, the College of the Environment. Our dept., ESS, Oceanography, and several other departments will likely be part of it. You can find a little bit more about it here: http://www.washington.edu/provost/coenv/index.html and also in the most recent Provost's Town Hall Meeting which you can watch here http://www.washington.edu/provost

The Provost wants to increase the awareness of all of the environmental research that is being conducted at the UW and grow the UW's leadership in this area. A statement from the above web page says: "We believe that this College will not only increase the University’s ability to conduct leading-edge research, but will facilitate proactive solution-driven work while simultaneously producing informed, environmentally conscious citizens and leaders."

This makes me wonder is the UW considering doing something similar to what those at ETH did? Does anyone know?

If you search the web for carbon offsets you'll find a lot. There are a number of companies selling them. The amount they charge varies widely for offsetting the same amount of carbon. There is no regulation of the companies in the US so who knows if they are really offsetting what you paid for. I think there is some regulation in countries that have signed the Kyoto protocol but I'm not sure. Also, places like ETH's myclimate.org only accept contibutions in swiss frans and euros which is currently suboptimal for those wanting to contribute in dollars and will likely continue to be for some time. It would great if UW had a web site to collect dollars from those wanting to offset their carbon emissions and have the students, faculty and staff actually do it and at the same time hopefully fund innovations into new and better ways of doing it.

I think UW already has a history of doing things like this, for example, this link says http://uwnews.org/uweek/uweekarticle.asp?articleID=22435 "the 15-year alliance between City Light and the UW has resulted in 350 conservation projects in 293 buildings, resulting in energy savings valued at $19 million." I don't know if UW on its own could offset everything contributors asked for and if they couldn't they need to turn enough money over to places such as myclimate.org to ensure its truly offsetted.