Carbon Offsets eCourse

“I really appreciated the Climatographers’ Carbon Offsets Course. It’s amazing how hard it is to find good resources and thinking like this on carbon offsets. None of my typical channels/NGOs surface things like this.”

Max Scher, Senior Manager of Sustainability at Salesforce.com


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The Climatographers’ Carbon Offsets eCourse synthesizes a great deal of the carbon offset thinking and literature of the last 30 years. The Climatographers' Dr. Mark Trexler worked on the first carbon offset project in 1988, developing the first offset quantification and monitoring methodology, and worked on hundreds of others after that. He is widely published on carbon offset topics, particularly with respect to the topic of "additionality." He does not have any financial interest in carbon offset projects or markets.

The Carbon Offsets eourse is quite detailed, and you can skip around to explore sections of the eCourse you might be most interested in. But bear in mind that most of the problems encountered by carbon offsets in advancing climate change mitigation objectives relate to the topic of additionality, and the associated topics of Type 1 and Type 2 errors as part of statistical hypothesis testing. You can dig into these topics via the eCourse.

The eCourse covers a number of topics:

  1. The Background and Evolution of Carbon Offsets
  2. Defining a Carbon Offset
  3. The Critical Importance of Additionality
  4. The Evolution of Carbon Offset Markets
  5. Carbon Offset Market Critiques
  6. Learning From 30 Years of Offsets
  7. An Alternative Approach to Offset Quality
  8. So You Want to Buy Carbon Offsets . . .
  9. Evaluating Carbon Neutral Claims
  10. Offsets vs. Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs)
  11. The Future of Carbon Offsets

You can access the Carbon Offsets eCourse here in the Climate Web.