I just heard a story on NPR about carbon credits as a unique gift idea for the holidays. For those who dont know, carbon credits or carbon offsets are a way people and businesses can pay for the carbon waste they are responsible for. Take a cross country flight for example, that creates some environmental damage from the carbon released into the atmosphere. When you buy your airplane ticket the airline does not force you to pay for that environmental impact. That is why some buy the offsets or carbon credits, in order to “fully” pay for the environmental costs of the flight, or whatever other activity you want to offsett. People buy offsets for their regular home use of electricity and driving or flying, businesses buy carbon credits to offset the carbon impact from all of their operations. For a business that pays the extra costs to offset their consumption, they can position their firm as a ‘carbon neutral’ company which can make the firm more competitive to some consumers.

Now lets peel back this business and see what it really is, a simple buying and selling marketplace. Buyers, like the consumers and businesses discussed above, buy carbon credits from middle men marketplace websites and firms. These middleman websites or companies just buy and sell credits, they buy the carbon credits from solar farms, wind farms, reforestation projects, and many other environmentally beneficial operations taking place all around the world. All of these places are doing good things to the planet’s carbon equation to ‘offset’ the damage done by the buyers of carbon credits.

Now for the money making angle that this presents. Anyone can be a broker and sell carbon credits on a simple website or blog. Get all you need to get started at this site I just found, no need to reinvent the wheel here, all you need to get started is in one place. I think this is a great prospective auto-pilot income source, I think I just found my next mini site topic to promote! Learn how to sell carbon credits for profit. Email me or post a comment if you have any questions, or to hear more about my site that I set up to test the waters.