Chicago: Not-So-Green City

By Kalyn Belsha in News on Mar 21, 2009 8:35PM

According to documents obtained by the Tribune, Mayor Daley's administration hasn't made good on its pledge to fight global warming by purchasing 20 percent of its electricity from green energy sources. His deadline to do so passed two years ago, but the city still gets almost all its power from natural gas, nuclear plants and coal.

Officials in the mayor's office claim they have kept Daley's promise by purchasing carbon credits -- a controversial and unregulated method to offset pollution by paying money to green energy producers.

Made popular in recent years, many governments and corporations buy these carbon credits, but energy experts and the federal Government Accountability Office are calling into question the lack of standards that govern their purchase. In fact, the U.S. House of Representatives decided to stop buying them last month.

How does the credit work? Carbon brokers estimate how much pollution a client generates and then sells it an offset package that will help finance projects, such as planting trees. The expectation is that these activities will "cancel out" an equal amount of emissions.

But over the last two years, most of the carbon credits the city of Chicago purchased didn't reduce carbon emissions at all, experts say. Taxpayers angry over Quinn's proposed income tax hike can fume once more: they've been footing the bill for the city's regular usage of electricity over the last two years, as well as paying for more than $500,000 in carbon credits that have done nothing to fight global warming.

About 87 percent of the Chicago-purchased credits sent money to a 19-year-old wood-burning power plant in North Carolina. A carbon broker who handled the deal said in an e-mail obtained by the Tribune that these credits "do not have a value in offsetting" carbon emissions because they did not finance a new source of energy.