Carbonated Leverage

Because we are a nonprofit organization, offsetting your climate footprint through Carbonfund is also tax deductible. And at a cost of just $5.50 to offset a ton of carbon dioxide -- the average person is responsible for about 10 tons a year -- our prices are the lowest, by far, of any group doing what we do. Also, because we want you to reduce your footprint each year, we give energy-saving recommendations. Our hope is that each year your donation to Carbonfund will decrease as you emit less and less. Can a for-profit company say that?

While overseas, we both saw firsthand the environmental destruction caused by years of abuse, authoritarianism, and just bad policies. We saw the science of climate change become more accurate and the effects become more apparent through higher temperatures, more severe storms, and the melting of the Antarctic ice shelf. We also saw the global community adopt Kyoto while the U.S., the world's largest emitter by far, rejected it. And the birth of our two daughters prompted us to really do something about it.

We thought, how do you solve the problem of climate change, how do you get beyond small incremental changes -- as this train is speeding toward us -- to zero climate-change impact? And Carbonfund just seemed the most direct path to reducing climate change.

The other thing we are not doing well is showing how easy some of the solutions are. Is it really that difficult to imagine a world where 80 percent of new homes have a cost-effective solar hot-water heater? And couldn't each family somehow survive with one car that gets 35 to 45 mpg? How about a two-cents-a-gallon gas tax to increase our energy efficiency and renewable budgets sixfold? Gas prices went up by a dollar a gallon over the last year -- is two cents really going to dismantle the U.S. economy? C'mon.