Carbon Action Now!

Helping people help the planet!

The Problem

"Perhaps the greatest problem of all faced by voluntary carbon offsetting is ... the fact that most people and organizations are only weakly motivated to reduce their carbon emissions. For this reason, even notwithstanding concerns about scientific legitimacy and additionality, voluntary carbon offsetting can never offer a general solution to climate change. In order for it to do so, the number of organizations and individuals buying offsets would have to increase sharply." [1]

CarbonActionNow! addresses the weak motivation of "most people and organizations" by leveraging the power of commitment engendered by belonging to a team and the power of sponsorship to motivate heroic achievements. Through motivated individual efforts to reduce their personal carbon footprint, businesses not yet fully engaged in climate action become so engaged, and collectively, across a broad and diverse community, deliver emissions reductions and offsets of global significance.

[1] Hyams, K. and Fawcett, T. (2013) The ethics of carbon offsetting. WIRE: Climate Change.

The Solution

CarbonActionNow! (CAN!) enables individuals and groups to magnify the results of their emissions reduction achievements and collectively deliver a significant reduction in global carbon emissions, through;

A group-based process to plan, baseline, and verify personal emissions reductions actions
Purchase of each group's verified personal emissions reductions (VPERs) by their sponsor
Purchase and retirement of UNFCCC issued certified emissions reductions (CERs) using sponsor's funds

Sponsors are incentivized to purchase their sponsored group's VPERs at a rate that allows up to 20 CERs to be purchased and retired for each VPER. In this way individual efforts are multiplied, and the collective action of a global community of CAN! Action Groups can deliver a significant global impact.

A community of 1000 Action Groups, each of 20 people, each achieving a personal footprint reduction of 1 tonne-CO2 per year would avoid 20,000 tonne-CO2 emissions per year. With committed sponsors funding this just 10-fold, 200,000 tonnes-CO2 emissions would be avoided. For scale, that is more than the UNFCCC's Go Climate Neutral Now! online platform achieved in its first two years of operation.

If this community could grow to 1% of Facebook, it could avoid the emission of 100 to 200 million tonnes-CO2 per year, more than the emissions of Belgium, perhaps of the Netherlands.