Carbon Offset Verification Model & Marketplace

[shilojones]

Carbon Offset Marketplace Functional Requirements

Let's democratize carbon offsets! We envision a platform that allows any homeowner to get help financing projects to reduce the carbon emissions of their home through the selling of those reductions as carbon offsets.

Important

We still need help with the organization of this project. Contributions to the requirements or directions in this README are very welcome!

Brief Note on the Project Motivation

The vast majority of offset dollars today go toward carbon capture projects (like tree planting). Those projects are unfortunately more at risk than ever before from to the increasing prevalence of wild fires due (ironically) to climate change. Futhermore, those offsets may only reinforce behavior that contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, which only prolongs the problem. If we can allocate some of those investments into technological transitions that actually reduce the burning of fossil fuels, we may provide a more reliable AND longer-lasting solution. A direct-to-consumer solution would enable this reallocation of offset investments in the broadest possible way. But that solution would need to meet consumers where they are: using the information they have ready access to and converting that into credible offsets they can sell themselves to fund those projects.

Requirements

The primary goal of the Carbon Offset Marketplace is to develop a direct to consumer platform for purchasing carbon offsets by financing home energy reduction projects. Requirements would be:

• Standards and processes required for recipients of the offset funds in order to guarantee new, incremental carbon reductions with a high certainty.
  • Important: What should be required to prevent falsification of submissions?
  • Important: What should be required to support the most accurate estimations of carbon reduction?
• Functionality to convert consumer provided information into reasonably precise estimates of carbon savings
  • Proposal: Utilize the Climate Cooperative's Home Energy Assessment Database & API
    • Note: Suggestions of alternative methodolgies are also more than welcome
• A platform for direct public/consumer use that handles:
  • Submission of projects for offset certification through the system described above
  • Listing of those certified offsets on a marketplace for purchase by consumers
  • Browsing/searching of marektplace offsets, including reviewable seller profiles (volume of offsets certified and sold, buyer ratings of offsets, etc.)
  • Purchase of offets and delivery of proof of offsets
  • Transfer of payment from those purchases to the provider of the offset project

Note

A possible stepping stone project: Live Carbon Reduction Counter for Installer Websites

• An open source tool for professionals to recieve a collective total of attributable carbon reductions from their work or installations.
• One possible vision for the end-use is a live counter that could be placed on a website that would show the total carbon reduced (from a given date) via the projects completed by that entity. Bringing attention to companies/operators with carbon reducing services and incentivizing those entities to provide more of those services. By removing the monetization component that's necesary for the marketplace project, this would lessen the requirements of validation needed to reach a proof of concept for one of the other key functions (delivering accurate and credible carbon savings estimates to consumers from provided project information).