GreenMicrofinancing

Last week, while world markets were tanking, I was attending a fascinating program, the GreenPowerConference on Carbon Markets. For my work here at GreenMicrofinance I wanted to better understand this emerging scene - each microclient who obtains a loan to go renewable instead of remaining petroleum-dependent lowers her carbon emissions.   In theory that is a huge amount of carbon offsetting in aggregate, even if each individual household or business has just a miniscule carbon footprint by global standards.
The problem: the earth is overheating due to excessive carbon emissions caused by consuming fossil fuels. The solution, to reduce these carbon emissions, is global and massive, and while the US is late to the table, it is clear that even with footdragging politicians slowing the process, the United States business and environmental sectors, and even our state governments, are moving forward without them.
A presentation by Steven Fine of ICF International laid out the challenge elegantly for a non-techy person like me.

1. How do you design and plan systems and projects when the cost of energy is not knowable? Look at how unpredictable prices for different energy sources have been in the last year or two. Oil went up $25 a barrel today. Wind energy is now considered cost effective. Solar prices are expected to come down. We are all flying blind here.
2. The regulations and policies are not yet known. While it is assumed there will be a USA cap & trade system in place, the Western Climate Initiative states are initiating their own, a Northeast consortium of states are doing the same, RGGI, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, kicks into place on 1/1/09, and Kyoto itself expires in 2012.
3. The technologies to accomplish the goals continue to develop, but most are not in place yet, like sequestration of coal emissions. Their price is also a complete unknown. I can add 2 more items to Fine's:
4. This marketed and traded commodity, tons of carbon, is invisible to begin with and
5. What is actually being "produced" is the opposite; that carbon ton is in reality Not Being Produced, so its existence is abstract.  We are buying and selling the non-creation of an invisible substance. Tricky!

You see the problems. It's remarkable to me that so much has actually been accomplished; for example, despite a lot of grumbling about their slow and bureaucratic procedures, the UN's committee which approves projects for offsets, called CDM's, clean development mechanisms, has approved several 1000 projects, with thousands more in the pipeline.  We are hard to work to help MFI clients capture their fair share of the goodies.  While by Western standards, microclient emissions per household is miniscule, receiving compensation would create a rare asset.

photo from Good Magazine