It's a case of buyer beware for anyone wanting to offset their CO2 emissions, writes Wendy Frew.

Buy a Tsunamii T-shirt and you won't only be making a fashion statement, you will also be investing in a wind farm or solar power project. That's the promise from two young commerce students from Sydney University, Gideon Birns and Tim Slater. Earlier this year they launched a company called Twenty50 to tap into the burgeoning but controversial market that offers to clean up your greenhouse gas pollution without impinging on your lifestyle.

For the past 12 months Birns and Slater have been working on a business plan to help Australian consumers offset greenhouse gas emissions by attaching carbon credits to branded consumer products.

They have started producing their first set of Tsunamii T-shirts with a range of prices (from $48 to $68) reflecting different amounts of greenhouse gas cuts.

The price of the cheapest shirt will cover enough clean energy or energy efficiency projects to offset 5 per cent of the greenhouse gases generated by the average Australian. Pay a bit more and you could offset 10 per cent or 20 per cent of your climate change pollution.

It's a new spin on a crowded market that offers to offset the greenhouse gas emissions we all generate when we use coal- or gas-fired electricity in our homes, or travel by car or plane.

More than a dozen Australian companies are offering to plant trees to soak up carbon dioxide, capture the methane that arises from landfill, or invest in energy efficiency or renewable power on your behalf.

But it is a market that has attracted its fair share of criticism, especially from environmentalists, and one that will be heavily regulated if a Labor government comes to power at the federal election later this year.

Green groups are worried the carbon offsets market, as it is known, could encourage a business-as-usual approach to energy and the generation of waste by suggesting people can pay to pollute. We should first be cutting back on energy use and car and plane travel wherever possible, they say.

The market also lacks transparency on pricing, emission calculations and the effectiveness of various emission reduction projects, say the critics.

Tree planting as a way of offsetting carbon emissions seems especially fraught with dangers, ranging from well-meaning companies that fail to monitor and nurture plantations, to several cases overseas of fraud, where customers paid for trees that were never planted or where old-growth forests were bulldozed and replaced with plantations.
source:www.smh.com.au