Carbon Offsets – A Quick Calculation
Written on Feb 23rd, 2009
I was doing a little research on carbon offsets this morning, and just for yucks, wanted to price out what it would cost to be a supplier of carbon offsets in Canada. There are various ways to offset carbon, but a fairly standard one is to plant trees in exchange for money. How many trees can you plant on an acre of land? Well, turns out this guy has it all figured out, at least for poplar trees. If you space them 10′ x 10′, you can get around 436 trees on an acre. The average tree consumes about 1 ton of CO2 over it’s lifetime, which according to this website is around 80 years. So over the course of 80 years, 436 trees will offset 436 tonnes of CO2. The going rate for carbon offsets are around $5 – $15 per metric ton of CO2 reduced. Let’s pick $10 […]
