The Company
4Offsets in a private venture located in Ann Arbor, MI, with staff in Toronto, ON and London, UK. 4Offsets was founded in November 2007 by Fred Weiss, Ed Yu and Marcelo Paniza, as way to address the global warming crisis. Our founders have built careers in IT, Security and a variety of internet businesses over the last 15 to 20 years. It is our belief that the fight against global warming requires market driven solutions, in order to speed solutions. Government works too slowly to handle the entire task.
The Problem
Most people feel powerless when they examine a problem of the size of global warming. We tend to throw our hands up in the air and exclaim "what difference can I make?!" Most of us can't park the car or buy $25,000 of solar cells to eliminate most of our CO2, we can't afford to. Even acts that are helpful, such as planting a tree or building a 'low tech' solar pool heater aren't practical for most. Most people give up at that point or decide to make a donation to a non-profit that addresses some or all of the issue they care about.
The Solution
Fortunately the marketplace has created a 'third way', based on theories of free market economists such as Milton Freidman. These are commodity contracts that identify activities related to reducing CO2. Activities include building a wind farm, growing trees, and remediation of methane emission. These projects are the basis for creating a Commodity contract that packages that emission into contract that can be bought or sold. These Commodity contracts allow buyers to offset their carbon dioxide usage with the money in turn increases the seller's rate of return on their CO2 reducing investment.
Unfortunately the details of how this all works is an even harder to wade thru then the original problem of helping fight global warming. 4Offsets has been created to bridge that gap. 4Offsets deals with the Commodity contracts so that you can visit us and in 1 simple transaction offset your carbon footprint. Yes, that's it, you come by our site, identify the offset package that most closely matches your needs, pay online and go on with life knowing that you've done something to help.
The Result
What exactly does buying this offset to do to reduce CO2? The offset you buy, is based on a CO2 emissions contract that 4Offsets has bought and retired. This means that for every ton of offsets you buy, we have purchased a ton of offsets on the emissions exchange and retired them for usage. In other words, each ton of CO2 you help retire is a ton that can not be bought by a coal burning power plant to offset their output. This should increase the cost of these emission contracts. The result is that CO2 emitters will have to pay more to pollute and that the CO2 remitters will receive more money for their offsets, helping increase the profitability of their wind farms and other remediation projects. This should speed investment in carbon free sources of energy.
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