The folks at ClimateSmart tell us that their Climate Action Plan (CAP) is right on budget — they’ve spent about $860k and ended up getting just about the same amount from the carbon tax. That’s quite a feat in and of itself, as we can probably all appreciate here in the tail end of tax season.

They’ve also put out a progress report (PDF), which we’ve gone ahead and looked at. One of the interesting parts was a breakdown of greenhouse gas emissions by sector, which showed this:

• Commercial: 58%
• Transportation: 22%
• Residential: 16%
• Solid waste: 4%

Obviously, the commercial sector should be a big focus of the program. And it seems to have been. The progress report explained that the costs and average payback time — that is, the time after which infrastructure changes will have saved enough in energy costs to pay for themselves — have gone up because of “the inclusion of projects which tend to carry higher costs such as heating and cooling system replacements.”

Here’s the assessment of the building performance program, as found in the progress report:

It looks good — like businesses are starting to think more long-term. But the progress report carries on for much longer about residential programs than about commercial programs. While residential programs are important, if a business changes its ways, there’s a bigger impact. It would be great to go into more detail on just how green investments impact the bottom line, and outline some of the changes made by businesses listed in the project report.

We’d love to hear — in the comments or on the forum — from businesses who participated in the project report on how they convinced themselves or their accountants or whomever that they should spend now, save now and save later.

Boulder’s one thing. Boulder’s small. Boulder’s landlocked.

But affixing a carbon tax-like program to a heavily-populated port city like San Francisco is a whole different animal. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District wants to charge businesses a fee of 4.2 cents per metric ton of carbon dioxide. The draft regulation imposing the new fees would go into effect on July 1, 2008.

According to a fact sheet put out by the BAAQMD (PDF here), it would take stock of how much emitted greenhouse gases were reported over a year, and charge the fee before allowing a facility to re-apply for a permit to own and operate equipment that emits pollutants.

One example provided in the initial coverage of the proposal by the San Jose Mercury-News gives is that a Shell oil refinery in the affected area would be charged $186,475 a year for its carbon dioxide emissions.

That’s a lot of money, and even a huge corporation like Shell will take notice of it. But they’ll likely fight it, too. And they won’t be alone. (more…)

We posted a little bit ago about how the University of Colorado-Boulder commutes, so it only made sense to check in with Naropa University, also located in Boulder. Paul Montgomery, transportation coordinator, said that Naropa hasn’t done the kind of intensive surveying that his counterpart at CU has done.

At the same time, Naropa does participate in Bike to Work Week (which fell on June 24-30 last year), and some employees make pledges to carpool, bike or walk. We’re hoping to get some stats on this — how many employees have pledged, for example.

Naropa also gives out EcoPasses to full-time staff and students pay a mandatory $30 for their EcoPasses. Thirty bucks!

What’s black and gold and commutes an estimated 571,122 miles per day? The people that learn, teach and work at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Which means: How they commute is pretty important.

David Cook, alternative transportation manager at CU, mentioned at a recent meeting of Boulder-area transportation managers the total mileage that he estimates students, faculty and staff at his university commute on a daily basis: nearly 600,000 miles.

(more…)

Dave Newport, director of the Environmental Center at CU, isn’t into renewable energy credits.

“One, RECs suck,” he said. “Two, RECs suck, and three, RECs suck. Anything I do is better than a REC. It was the tool of choice when that was the only tool in the toolbox.”

University of Colorado-Boulder students have set aside $50,000 to ultimately go to the Carbon Fund, an initiative coming from the Governor’s Energy Office.

“At this point we’re just pledging to work with them,” Newport said. “They don’t have a product yet, but they will.”

He said that the local carbon offsets that the Carbon Fund will offer are a step beyond the RECs that CU had been buying from Community Energy. Newport said that it’s hard to explain RECs, because they don’t go directly to new projects, but pay — in a way — for projects that have already started.

“No real behavioral change comes with a REC,” he said. “[A] turbine’s gonna turn when the wind hits it, not when money hits it.” But with the Colorado Carbon Fund, which plans to sell carbon offsets generated by local projects, he said, “You’ll be able to touch and feel your specific project.”

Kind of like adopting a highway, a carbon offset purchaser could know which Colorado-based project they were helping to fund.

Another benefit for CU getting involved early with the Colorado Carbon Fund is that Newport sees growth not only for the CCF, but also for the university. “We may get to the point where our students can develop local projects and [we] could be a seller of local offsets to the Colorado Carbon Fund.”

Sunday’s New York Times had a big story today on greening the suburbs. It’s not particularly ground-breaking, but it does make you think about drying your laundry on clotheslines and growing strawberries instead of lawns. What are some of the easiest things we’ve been overlooking in our attempts to make our suburban lifestyles lighter on the environment? PLUS, what kinds of restrictions are we seeing?

A lot of neighbors would be steamed if you propped up a wind turbine in your back yard — but what about drying your laundry? What about installing solar panels on your roof or in your yard? Which covenanted neighborhoods in Boulder ban such outwardly visible efforts to save energy or use local renewables? Please comment below.

The Colorado Carbon Fund, brainchild of the Governor’s Energy Office, seemed to become a more tangible, richer thing at the University of Colorado last week when CU pledged to spend about $50,000 on carbon offsets from the Fund. Colorado Governor Bill Ritter was even on hand to talk about it.

But what is it? Well, it’s an idea.

The Colorado Carbon Fund was started by the Governor’s Energy Office as a localized alternative to Renewable Energy Credits that would help Colorado make strides toward more voluntary environmentally-sound practices on a large scale.

Credits, which can be bought from middlemen like Community Energy, CU’s dealer over the past, function kind of like retroactive investments in renewable energy. For example, the credits that CU had been buying helped alleviate, in part, the startup costs of a wind farm in southeastern Colorado, according to Susan Innis, program manager of the Colorado Carbon Fund.

The new Carbon Fund functions differently. It’s designed to enable local entities like CU to help pay for local carbon offset projects. Innis gave the example of improving insulation in homes in Colorado to help preserve energy that would heat them.

“We obtain those carbon offsets from those projects and we would sell them to you,” Innis said. The functions of Renewable Energy Credits and the carbon offsets offered by the Colorado Carbon Fund are quite similar, in that they both provide money and encouragement for carbon-cutting measures, but the Colorado Carbon Fund would focus its efforts on local projects.

The CU Environmental Center learned about the Carbon Fund’s plans and opted not to renew their contract with Community Energy.

“We’re looking at a number of different certification standards and protocols for measuring,” Innis said. “There are some widely accepted methodologies for calculating greenhouse gas emissions.”

An advisory board that the Governor’s Energy Office will soon assemble will decide which standards to use, but three well-known programs they’re already looking at include the Gold Standard, the Voluntary Carbon Standard and the Green E Climate, she said.

More soon, as we talk to Dave Newport, director of the Environmental Center at CU.