A lot of the media treats purchases of carbon-offsets as pardons bought for percieved eco sins. The attitude seems to be that companies are foolish to pay for an intangible public good they cannot guarantee.

There is a precedent for such an altruistic business model: Public broadcasting subsisted on voluntary donations for decades. Buying offsets is directly funding a sustainable future, a public good some view as even worthier than Masterpiece Theater.

Most offset companies give companies the choice of what to support. For example, Terrapass offset buyers have now funded more than 17,000 megawatt hours, or 9 percent the total capacity of a wind farm. That means that of the 45 turbines, four of them turn using the dollars of TerraPass members.

But a recent Washington Post story uses the example of environmentally incorrect carbon offsets: eco-guilt-ridden purchasers of offsets paying $34,000 to a landfill company to flare off the methane generated by the fill.

The article quotes the executive director of the agency that runs the landfill admitting that the money paid by carbon traders is "gravy" -- and that the company would have flared the methane, even without those payments. According to the Post, "that project was put in long before the offsets were sold and for a different reason: to keep dangerous gases from accumulating in a capped landfill. So if the offset market dried up completely? Nothing would change."

The landfill operator acknowledged that the funding was redundant, but plenty of worthwhile projects are in need of financing to make zero-emissions electricity from methane digesters. The $2 million dollar cost slows their adoption, so carbon-offset funding would help such a project get off the ground.

Maddening, right? But in Europe, where they have been doing this for longer because of the Kyoto agreements, offsets are audited by third-party accounting firms. The audits ensure that they are not funding something that would have been done as part of business as usual, but also to ensure that the project reduces carbon emissions.

The kind of reporting in the Washington Post article encourages the simplistic view that all offsets are redundant frauds perpetrated on gullible treehuggers. Reading it makes you think that carbon offsets routinely fund obviously fraudulent or inferior projects. But rather than discredit the entire offset business model, we should ensure that projects are professionally certified.

Accountants can add and subtract intangible goods and services. We need to apply those skills now to auditing carbon offsets.

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