How Carbon Offsets Work

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Carbon offsets are a practical and effective way to address climate change and encourage the growth of renewable energy.

With them, you can counteract your personal carbon emissions—your “carbon footprint”—while contributing to a more sustainable future.

What is a “Carbon Footprint”?

When you use energy or products manufactured with fossil fuels, you generate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. The combination of emissions caused by your home, transportation, and daily life is known as your “carbon footprint.”

There are many ways to reduce your carbon footprint—you can drive
a hybrid car, use compact fluorescent lighting, and eat local food.
View more green tips.

But even if you take every energy-saving step, if you are a 21st-century human, you will leave a carbon footprint. Using carbon offsets, you can counteract the greenhouse gas emissions that you cannot avoid causing.

How Carbon Offsets Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

NativeEnergy’s Help Build™ carbon offsets accomplish more than most: they help fund new projects that reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

How Help Build™ Carbon Offsets Work:
Typically, when someone buys a carbon offset, the money goes to pay for a reduction in greenhouse gases that has already occurred. This purchase supports an existing project. But sometimes community-based projects, like wind turbines at public schools, don’t have enough funding to be built in the first place.

Luckily, Help Build™ carbon offsets bridge the gap. You purchase carbon offsets from your project in advance—that is, before they occur. By doing so, you play a key role in funding its construction, enabling it to cut greenhouse gas pollution on your behalf for years to come.

To calculate your carbon offset, we use internationally recognized methodologies to determine the emissions that your project will reduce. Once generated, all carbon offsets also undergo third-party certification to ensure that they truly occurred. For details, visit our certifications and project performance pages.

Take Action

Reducing your carbon footprint with NativeEnergy carbon offsets is simple:

1. Calculate your carbon footprint
   Quantify the greenhouse gas emissions from your household, travel, or business.
2. Reduce your footprint with NativeEnergy carbon offsets
   Purchase carbon offsets through our carbon calculators or our quick purchase tool.

Questions? Read our FAQs page or contact us at 800-924-6826 x200 or support@nativeenergy.com.