Greenfleet

This is the age of the market solution. Governments instead of legislating prefer to leave things to the market. This is certainly the case with greenhouse emissions. Australia needs a carbon tax.. Instead, the market creates business niches like Greenpower and Greenfleet to allow a tiny demographic - wealthy people who care about the environment – to pay to make a difference.

This is certainly far better than nothing. The more people who take up Greenpower the better. Another environmental market mechanism of interest is Greenfleet. Greenfleet is a non-profit organisation which plants native trees to offset your carbon emissions.

They offer, for $40, to plant 17 native trees to absorb 4.3 tonnes of carbon – the amount released in a year by an average motorist. Alternatively, you can work out your personalised carbon load of your car, household and air flights by using the Greenfleet carbon calculator – the Tree Totaller.You then pay Greenfleet to plant the required number of trees for the year's emissions.

The calculator is easy to use. Car emissions are calculated from fuel type and either your weekly fuel cost or the annual distance driven and fuel consumption of your car. Household emissions are calculated from your electricity and gas bills, or you can work out an approximate rate from your household size, postcode, hot water system, and home heating system. Air flight emissions are calculated on the number or total yearly distance of your domestic, short international or long international flights.

It seems like a good idea in the absence of government policy. The trees are planted in sites of environmental concern using locally harvested seed and replicating the original mix of species. Greenfleet says they won't be harvested. Most of the NSW have been in the Murray River catchment. Greenfleet aims to become Kyoto- compliant so the carbon can be measured by international standards – this probably means participating in the international carbon trading market. The Greenfleet Advisory Board includes some credible people such as Professor Ian Lowe, Graeme Pearman and Peter Newman.

Greenfleet's website is well worth looking at Maybe on a local level it's good to use the Greenfleet calculator to work out how many trees would offset your carbon emissions, double it to give something extra to the future, add half again to allow for survival rates, and go and plant endemic species at home on a friend's place – preferably a friend who has a Voluntary Conservation Agreement.

Offsets are great inasfar as they go some way towards neutralizing new, additional carbon releases. And trees perform so many other beneficial services. But offsets don't help to reduce the carbon imbalance. They don't address the other impacts of driving and flying and burning coal. They let us maintain our lifestyles while soothing our conscience if we have one. It's best to try and reduce our resource use. Many people in the world don't have a choice about this. Here in the developed world with our enormous ecological footprint, we do.

To visit the GreenFleet website click here.