Lessons Learned: Offsetting Carbon

In December I wrote about how I calculated my carbon footprint again for the first time in years.

The end result was that I sent $315 to the Arbor Day Foundation in the hopes that they could put that right in to the purchase of trees.

The thinking was that, rather than buying renewable energy credits, I would invest in trees, which collect many tons of carbon over their lifetimes. It does not reduce my current carbon footprint, but it’s kind of like paying to clean up what I spilled this year.

Renewable energy credits, while laudable, really only go toward installing future renewable energy –thus avoiding future carbon emissions.

That’s great, but each and every one of us needs to find a way to do two things:

First, pull carbon out of the air that we put up there over the last 100 or so years.

Second, cut our personal carbon emissions by about 8% every year for the next ten years if we want to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

That is the difference between future carbon avoidance.

Thus, trees.

By planting trees, I’m helping to pull carbon out of the system while at the same time I am taking other steps to support renewable energy use today, or cut my emissions personally. We have to do both.

Okay, so here’s the report: it was a little disappointing.

The Arbor Day Foundation annual report was not exactly clear as to how much of each donation goes toward trees or the planting of trees. I’m okay with standard over-head, but I don’t want half of my donation going toward staff or high rent.

I heard back from a staff member who told me that it breaks down like this:

87% – Program Service expenses
9% – Fundraising expenses
4% – Management and general expenses

When I sought clarification about whether the programs within Arbor Foundation (Arbor Day Farm and Trees for America) had, I got this response:

“The overhead for Arbor Day Farm is included in the 20% for Arbor Day Farm and the overhead for Trees for America is included in the 39% for Trees for America (not the 11% for general and administrative).”

What? Is that not redundant?

They then referred me back to the annual report and their federal 990 form.

Circular, huh?

I thought by giving to such a large group, I could take advantage of their buying power and thus plant more trees than if I just went out and bought trees, retail, and planted them.

Later a friend told me about Charity Navigator, a website that tracks and ranks how good charities are at spending your dollars. They gave Arbor Day Foundation a 86.78 score out of 100.

This is not what percentage of their budget goes to programs. It’s a mix of their accountability and how they spend their money.

It looks like about 94% of their budget goes to programs. But even that is not clear.

This points to the general problem with trying to help in this way. I could spend a couple hours trying to figure out what portion of their spending goes to trees, and which to overhead. But, that should be easy for a busy person.