Eugene poised to join carbon war.

Byline: Diane Dietz The Register-Guard

If you thought the decades-long drive to boost recycling in Eugene was relentless, brace yourself, because you haven't seen anything yet.

The city is poised for the fight against global warming: house by house by house.

Activists want Eugene residents to go "carbon neutral" in their energy use, in their travel and in their product purchases.

Mayor Kitty Piercy signed on to a free-lance version of the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for a 7 percent cut in greenhouse gases within the city borders by 2012.

A group of bureaucrats from many public agencies in the southern Willamette Valley is working behind the scenes to calculate the overall carbon generation within city borders to compare how Eugene stacks up against the Kyoto standards and to set a baseline for future reductions.

The University of Oregon-based Climate Leadership Initiative is launching a pilot project in January in two Eugene neighborhoods to help households audit and then cut their carbon emissions. They hope to replicate the effort citywide.

Some people, including some scientists, will think the efforts are unnecessary.

They doubt that the global warming that researchers have detected is beyond the normal fluctuations of the Earth's temperature.

Or they concede that the Earth is especially warm right now, but they don't believe that humans caused - or should do anything to slow - the warming.

But their skepticism isn't slowing individuals and businesses from ratcheting down their carbon output.

"People are doing it because it's the right thing to do," said Mike Burnett, who runs a Portland-based program that helps people go carbon neutral. "They think global warming is a real problem and this is a way they can do something now."

The average American produces 22 tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the United Nations.

Any individual armed with data about their driving mileage, air travel, house size and other factors can calculate their carbon production exactly with a Web-based calculator.

Many strategies for reducing one's "carbon footprint" are familiar conservation measures: drive less, weatherize and - you know the drill - reduce, reuse and recycle.

But activists are going further, asking people to take into account their air travel, which produces high levels of carbon dioxide, and the fossil fuels it takes to haul myriad products to their doorsteps.

"We're used to eating anything we want any time we want regardless of whether it's in season or whether it's grown here. Our tastes have developed that way, and that's a hard habit to break," said Sarah Mazze, who's leading the neighborhood project for the Climate Leadership Initiative.

Remedies include telecommuting rather than flying, buying locally grown food and - when all else fails - buying carbon "offsets" to make up for the remaining tons you generate.

Buying a carbon offset means giving money - usually via your credit card - to organizations that funnel cash into projects that avoid, displace or sequester greenhouse gases.

Energy efficient buildings, for instance, need less heat, so they avoid the creation of greenhouse gasses. Wind and solar electricity generating projects displace electricity created by coal or gas-fired plants. Trees absorb carbon dioxide, so planting new forests sequesters greenhouse gases.

About 30 nonprofit or for-profit carbon emissions offset providers have sprung up in recent years to sell offsets to businesses and individuals in the United States.

One of the first was The Climate Trust, based in Portland and started as a result of a 1997 state law that requires all new power-generating plants in the state to fund green projects.

Since then, four major power plants have located in Oregon. The Climate Trust has paid for 10 green projects worth $4.9 million that will offset carbon dioxide that's the equivalent of removing 300,000 cars from the road for one year.

"We were way ahead of our time," said Burnett, the trust executive director.

The offset market serving businesses facing regulatory action has soared in the past five years, and voluntary efforts got under way quietly in the past two to three.

U.S. businesses and individuals - by the tens of thousands - are voluntarily paying into offset programs for good PR or good conscience.

Beaverton-based Nike, for example, buys offsets from The Climate Trust to compensate for its air travel to Asia. Expedia.com, based in Bellevue, Wash., is asking customers if they want to offset their carbon emissions when they travel with a $6 surcharge on their domestic airline tickets.

Individuals can make offset payments at Web sites such as CarbonCounter.org and TerraPass.com. Popular bands such as Pearl Jam, the Dixie Chicks and the Dave Matthews Band are doing just that.

The going rate is $10 to $15 to compensate for 10 metric tons of carbon a business or a householder emits.

It would cost $200 per individual per year for the average U.S. citizen to become carbon neutral through donating money to an offset program.

But participants see a couple of problems with the offset strategy of reducing global warming.

The carbon emission offset industry is unregulated and open to some questionable practices, such as giving companies money for green projects they did in past years or subsidizing environmental measures firms would have undertaken anyway.

Reputable offset providers guarantee that their projects will truly mean less carbon in the air in the future, Burnett said.

The Climate Trust invests in projects through a competitive process in which the builders answer a request for proposals and the trust chooses the best responses.

The projects undergo rigorous review, Burnett said. Each must show the carbon reduction, and the results are verified by a third party with no financial interest in the project, he said.

SEE FOR YOURSELF Using Web-based calculators, you can figure out how much carbon dioxide you generate per year. The more detail you provide about your driving habits or energy use, the more precise the answer. The calculations are free, but the Web sites ask for a donation to go into a project to reduce greenhouse gases. The Climate Trust: www.CarbonCounter.org TerraPass: www.terrapass .com/index.html Conservation International: www.conservation.org/xp/ CIWEB/programs/climate change/carboncalculator.xml Carbonfund.org CARBON GLOSSARY Carbon: "Carbon" comes from carbon dioxide, the most plentiful of the man-made greenhouse gases that are blanketing the world, trapping the sun's rays and raising the surface temperature, according to a growing scientific consensus. Carbon footprint: A measure of how much an individual, household or business generates in carbon emissions. Offset: Individuals and businesses buy "offsets" to compensate for the tons of annual carbon emissions they generate. Some businesses are required to pay for offsets. Other businesses and individuals do it voluntarily. Offset money is used for programs to cut carbon emissions or increase carbon absorption. Carbon neutral: This occurs when individuals or businesses have cut their carbon emissions as much as possible through conservation and then bought offsets to compensate for the rest. Car equivalency: The offset industry talks about carbon in metric tons, but that's hard for people to visualize, so they convert it into the equivalent number of cars a given conservation project would take off the road for a year.