Ever since Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” brought climate change to the mainstream, the infatuation of the media with the topic has been a mixed blessing in my opinion. On the positive side, the continuous coverage of climate change and other things environmental has ushered in an era of eco-awareness that we would have thought impossible just a few short years ago. On the negative side, the media is frequently guilty of reporting high-impact sound bites that barely scratch the surface of the story and almost never explain the actual science.

Recently I was reading an interesting article in the local paper about green initiatives in new home construction. They provided a statistic about the per capita annual carbon footprints of the residents of major cities. Although they provided no source for the information, it was reported that Denver leads North American cities (25 tons per capita) while the footprint of Toronto’s residents is 9.3 tons. Many people who read this might get the impression that the residents of Denver are consumption-crazy eco-terrorists that burn oil like there’s no tomorrow.

What the newspaper didn’t report is that Denver’s carbon footprint is so high because its electricity is almost entirely derived from fossil fuels. Meanwhile, Toronto resident’s receive almost three-quarters of their electricity from hydro-electric and nuclear sources, neither of which contribute to their carbon footprint. A telling statistic is that the average amount of electricity consumed per household is almost double in Toronto than it is in Denver. So much for the implication in the newspaper that Denver residents are consumption crazy.

Photographs courtesy of National Geographic Travel and Denver Cityscape.

The catastrophic mid-June floods in the US Midwest brought emotional and economic turmoil to that part of the country which we hope they are able to recover from quickly. The floods could also have a significant impact on the carbon offsets that are derived from the agricultural soils in that region.

Reduced tillage of agricultural fields increases the amount of carbon that is stored in the soils. Carbon offset credits from reduced tillage are commonly used in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). 46% of the CCX’s pre-2008 portfolio was from soil carbon sequestration, and much of that is from reduced tillage practices in the US Midwest.

The June 18 2008 North America newsletter by Point Carbon had a brief article that mentioned that acres might have to be pulled out of reduced till to plant new crops to replace those destroyed by flooding. Dave Krog (CEO of carbon credit aggregator Agragate) explained: “When you have a lot of standing water in a field - especially one that has a lot of plant material on the ground, you get large accumulations of trash (corn stock) accumulated in indifferent spots. It’s really difficult to plant through some of that trash.”

The full impacts of the devastating floods on CCX carbon offsets will likely not be known for several months as farmers decide the management practices (if any) that are needed to rehabilitate their water-logged fields. While the farmers have not started to pull out of their tillage agreements yet, it seems likely that a significant number of them may do so. This illustrates the main concern with soil sequestration offsets (permanence) and the need for reliable and robust insurance mechanisms to be in place to guard against situations like this.

In the voluntary carbon market tillage-derived offsets are very much a CCX product. Reduced tillage is an almost non-existent method of generating offsets for carbon retailers that are not CCX members.