Act Now Before It's Too Late

The Rationale: Pride in reducing my carbon footprint and satisfaction influencing the production of products I buy.

The outcome of Earth’s climate crisis boils-down to tackling two questions:

1. How do we reduce our carbon emissions?

2. How do we drawdown existing CO2 from the atmosphere?

Success addressing the first question is important because the current carbon footprint of the products we consume is unsustainable. Success in addressing the second question is important because even if net carbon emissions from current products is reduced to zero, Earth’s atmosphere already exceeds the CO2 threshold required to prevent the planet from exceeding the critical two degrees rise from 2015 levels.

The issue of addressing the second question is exacerbated because some people regard developing technology to remove atmospheric CO2 will only serve to disincentivise a need for success with the first question, i.e. Why worry about reducing a product’s carbon component if it can be removed from the atmosphere anyway?

CollaborationEarth credits (CE credits) are a tool enabling us to attack both questions together. It achieves this without government intervention, without taxes or new laws. CE credits are a twin strategy, bottom-up approach.

Individuals accept the cost of removing waste from the products they consume, just as they accept the cost of sewage infrastructure and curb-side garbage collection. CE’s second strategy is to facilitate consumers to influence the supply chain, from cradle to grave, of the products they purchase.

In recent years, technology has been developed to extract CO2 directly from the air and store it in perpetuity. Companies using these technologies are called Direct Access Carbon Capture (DACC) companies. The CE credits scheme involves individuals purchasing, on a voluntary basis, CE credits from DACC companies. Each CE credit certifies that one kilogram of CO2 has been extracted from the atmosphere and stored. The person then uses their purchased CE credits in two ways. Firstly, they display a record of their purchases on the Collaboration Earth’s website as a publicly available register of their offset to their carbon footprint. Secondly, they spend these CE credits with vendors on specific products with a certified carbon component.

Hundreds of companies sell thousands of products displaying a carbon component on the packaging. You may have observed this. If you haven’t, look for it. It appears on the packaging as a number in a similar way to the product’s display of fat, salt and sugar content. When you spend your Carboncoins with a vendor, you are signalling to the vender your preference for low-carbon component products. With this action, you incentivise the vendor to continually find ways to reduce their product’s carbon component to maintain competitive advantage.

Just as we take pride in placing an ever-greater proportion of our refuse in the recycle bin, Collaboration Earth members take pride in displaying an ever-greater carbon offset to their carbon footprint on the Collaboration Earth website. Members also derive satisfaction from exerting direct influence on the supply chain of society’s goods and services. You show how you make a difference.