80% of your money goes to the project to pay for implementation,
maintenance, validation, verification and certification, and the retirement of
carbon credits in the carbon market – a multitude of steps that ensure the
quality of our services. This figure puts us close to the top among offsetting
companies in terms of the efficiency in the use of funds. Our financials are
audited on an annual basis.
The remaining 20% go towards essential operating costs, including website
maintenance, printed materials and customer service. Since both Planetair and
myclimate are not-for-profit initiatives, any excess money is reinvested in the
fight to reduce global warming. Our financial accounts are audited on an annual
basis.
Businesses can write off offsets as part of their cost of doing business.
Since Planetair is not a registered charity but a not-for-profit organization, the
Canada Revenue Agency unfortunately does not currently offer deductions for
carbon offsets for individuals.
No. Your money is an investment in sustainable energy.
Two factors determine the price of an offset: the
amount of greenhouse gases that is calculated for your activities, and the
price that the seller charges to offset the emissions. Different approaches to
both mean that prices vary between sellers. Planetair continuously reviews its
pricing policy in order to ensure that its customers receive the best value for
money. Planetair’s higher prices are not the result of us taking higher
margins, but of selecting only the highest-quality offset projects through
myclimate. Currently, there are several reasons that explain why myclimate
credits are more expensive than those of some of its competitors:
- Planetair’s philosophy is to provide high quality offsets. In order to guarantee the quality and impact of the offsets it sells, Planetair only purchases offsets that meet high criteria, including the Gold Standard, the strictest standard available for emissions reductions through voluntary offsets.
- Planetair also purchases CDM offsets from myclimate, which are more expensive than VERs, but which satisfy the stringent requirements of the Kyoto Protocol.
- Planetair and myclimate do not have forestry projects or carbon sinks in their portfolio due to the controversy and uncertainty surrounding the science of tree planting as a tool in the fight against climate change. Tree planting projects are much cheaper and contribute to diminishing the price of offsets in other suppliers’ portfolio.
- Planetair uses a multiplier of 2 to calculate the CO2 emissions equivalent of flights to account for
the effects of radiative forcing.
Not all of our competitors use this multiplier. In 1999, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended setting this value at 2.7. Since then, the science has evolved, and more recent findings suggest that the effect is somewhat lower.
- Planetair also takes into account the fuel efficiency differences depending on flight distance, since short-haul flights and those with stopovers use comparatively more fuel than long-haul flights.
