A Cure for Carbon Guilt?

Last year, I took an extended road trip from my home in Kingston, Ontario, to the U.S. Southwest and Canada’s West Coast. I’m an avid rock climber and wanted to check out some of the legendary climbing destinations that abound in this part of North America. I visited Cochise Stronghold in southwest Arizona; Red Rock Canyon on the outskirts of Las Vegas; the soaring sandstone cracks and desert towers near Moab, Utah; and the granite slabs of Stawamus Chief, in Squamish, British Columbia. That’s the short list; I did a lot of climbing.  

I also did a lot of driving. Over eight months, I put more than 10,000 miles on my 2013 Subaru Outback, and I’m painfully aware that my gas-powered jaunt pumped at least 8183.33 lbs — just over four tons — of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. How did I come up with this number? I used the Finger Lakes Climate Fund carbon footprint calculator, which, in addition to allowing me to quantify my personal contribution to the climate crisis, also gives me a way to do something about it. 

The calculator not only measures the amount of carbon that your car or plane trip generates, but it also attaches a price to it (in my case, $102.29). If you so choose, you can donate that amount to the climate fund, which uses the donations to provide grants to low-income homeowners in New York’s Finger Lakes area to upgrade their homes with new or more insulation, LED lighting, air-source heat pumps, and other measures that make their homes more comfortable and more energy efficient. By contributing to the fund, I could offset the carbon footprint of my trip. I don’t live in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, but I hadn’t seen a tool like this anywhere. The fact that the program isn’t local to me didn’t matter, because greenhouse gas reductions anywhere in the world can help address climate change.

The calculator and the Finger Lakes Climate Fund are products of Sustainable Finger Lakes, an environmental non-profit organization based in Ithaca, New York. Its president, Gay Nicholson, says the fund was conceived a decade ago as a counterpoint to industrial-scale carbon offset schemes that, however well-intentioned, are typically complex and hard to understand and leave people wondering whether they’re an elaborate form of greenwashing.  

“I wanted to take kind of a systems approach by designing a local carbon offset fund that would be transparent, take carbon out of the air, and also deal with income inequality by aiming funds at low-income households to help pay for energy improvements,” she says. 

“I was aiming at climate activists and people who are environmentally concerned, to give them a place where they could take responsibility for their carbon emissions and offset them — especially their car travel or airplane flights. It’s kind of hard to do anything about that. You don’t want to tell people you can’t visit the grandchildren or go to a family wedding or things like that. So, a lot of people really appreciate that we offer a service that lets them take responsibility but not miss out on some of life’s big events.” 

As of early June 2023, donors had contributed $223,690 to the fund, and eighty-six grants had been awarded to Finger Lakes region homeowners for efficiency upgrades. Together, the upgrades offset 18,123,797 pounds of CO₂. The application process is relatively painless for the grant recipients, since the HVAC and other contractors who partner with Sustainable Finger Lakes are the ones who identify eligible homeowners; do the paperwork to verify their income; design, price, and install the upgrades; and ensure it’s all done properly. Since many upgrades are expensive — installing a new heat pump alone can cost up to $10,000 — the Climate Fund grants are often combined with subsidies and other financial incentives from, for example, power utilities and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, an agency that promotes energy efficiency and the use of renewable, non-fossil-fuel energy sources in the state.  

The grants are making a positive difference in people’s lives. Take Debra Albro, for example, who lives in a converted 1,000-square-foot mobile home in a forest about a twenty-minute drive west of Ithaca. It’s great there in summer — she loves to garden and has a fine one in her yard brimming with flowers, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, and raspberries. But until three years ago, when she connected with the Finger Lakes Climate Fund, she was heating her home with a forced-air coal furnace. It kept the place warm but ate up five tons of coal — $3,000 worth — every winter. On top of her monthly electric bill, that was a steep price to pay for Albro, a retiree on a limited income. The furnace also covered everything in her house with coal dust that irritated her lungs and made her sick. And she had to dispose of heaps of ash by shoveling them out and spreading them on her driveway.

Albro knew her coal furnace was financially untenable, bad for her health, and spewing tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. After seeing a newspaper ad about heat pump incentives, she contacted Halco Energy, a local insulation and heat pump installer that’s a partner in the Finger Lakes Climate Fund. A few weeks after Halco’s initial assessment visit, she received roughly $25,000 worth of energy efficiency upgrades to her home — including a new heat pump. Today, it keeps Albro warm in winter and cool in summer, and it’s cut her energy bill in half. 

“I couldn’t be happier,” says Albro, who, not surprisingly, has become a huge booster of the Climate Fund and New York’s incentive programs. “I’m out there pushing for all this stuff and trying to get friends to sign on and realize how much money they could save. They are low-income and they have their own homes. This can help them out!”