About Green Energy Credits

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Steve Jones and I'm going to talk a little about green energy credits. Well we know about our renewable resources which we have on the planet and these are basically good for the planet that we aren't using up the fossil fuels and the fossil resources that we have. But more importantly for our green energy credits, we need to think about certain gases which are put into the atmosphere. Not just the two here, but these are two of the most common ones. Methane, CH4 and carbon dioxide, CO2. Now we all hear of the greenhouse effect with a buildup of carbon dioxide, this basically acts as a blanket around the world preventing the heat from getting out and the planet gets warmer. That is not a good thing. So what we want to do is we want to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Methane is actually 12 times worse than carbon dioxide. So if you burn methane, you end up with gases, carbon dioxide, which are not good for the environment, but there's still a lot back to the methane. So what do we do? Well if I'm a company that's producing lots of carbon dioxide, well maybe in my process I can't stop that, I can't do anything about it so I have to pay. And the only way I can pay is by buying credits. I buy the credits, I pay money to a credit authority and they give me permission to emit that amount of carbon dioxide. But if I am a company which overall absorbs carbon dioxide, that is I don't send out into the atmosphere carbon dioxide, I actually end up bringing, reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, then I can do the process the other way around. I can get money from the authority to essentially allow another company to buy my carbon dioxide. And this is why we call it a credit. So I get a credit because I'm good, I don't produce lots of carbon dioxide, the guy who produces the carbon dioxide, he's making cars, he's doing that kind of thing, he can buy my credits, he can pay and he therefore can continue his business. So essentially we're enabling business to continue the business they're doing without penalizing him by law, all we have to do is let him pay for the privilege."