that you have to develop new technologies to help solve this problem it's just absolutely fundamentally key to solving this problem there is just no way we can do enough trees or algae we just have to have new technology if that's true  investment towards investments that will sprout new technological growth both in efficiency and in renewable energy sources as opposed to sequestration or land use or some areas isn't and turn it into those living plants that living ecosystem it's no longer harming the planet but it's also healing the harm done to date and providing an ongoing healing form and what we're concerned about with very heavily protected it will be a long term enormous benefit to that ecosystem there and the same thing goes in restoring the ocean if we don't restore the harm already done by all accounts it's only going to last a few hundred years longer in the ocean it's very easy to see cub and repositioned in the deep ocean for periods of millennia it may be back two thousand years from now inslee the certified emission reductions are actually units that are created under the kyoto protocol the european union has a trading system set up that recognizes those credits i think certainly within the framework blachford no because they're really for sale within the kyoto protocol they're not really for sale in the voluntary market there are vers voluntary emission reductions that are again it's a just a denomination of the credit but are held to a very similar standard typically from developing countries  we sell projects that are in the united states so we don't right now sell anything that would qualify there i think there are standards in development though including the gold standard that mister romm was talking about before that incorporate most if not all of the same at quite a large variety of different carbon credit markets out there it's important each year the vintage is important because we retire the credits on an annual basis but the label is also critically important so there  of different labels of carbon credits emerging in the markets around the world especially those markets where there is mandatory requirements the chairman gentleman's time is expired the chair recognizes the possible or that we should even try to develop federal guidelines for voluntary carbon offsets develop some guidelines that would clarify the voluntary carbon offset industry and still preserve it as a voluntary industry what is your take on that or should we just leave it alone and avoid full scale government regulation broekhoff i think it's possible for the federal government to provide some oversight and guidance for example in recommending best practice accounting protocols for the quantification of carbon assets also perhaps in terms of emit about two tons of carbon dioxide a year but you've paid five thousand dollars up front for it if you invest in if you buy carbon credits from trees and ocean projects around the world you might pay about five dollars a ton for it so not everybody can afford to go out and buy a brand new automobile with a five thousand dollars premium on it to reduce their carbon footprint by two tons a year but everybody can afford to plant enough trees to get two tons a year that's ten dollars a year everybody can afford to do that a family of four in the united states has a carbon footprint of about twenty tons per year at five dollars a ton that tree planting project are selling that's about one hundred dollars bucks a year that's eight dollars thirty three cents a month so buy mother nature one cheap cocktail a month and you've taken care of her now people who don't like offset projects who want the high priced engineered solutions are very opposed to this but it's part of the solution and it also heals the harm that's  done and everybody can afford it so the voluntary market to choose these affordable low end solutions the green solutions is a very practical step ms blackburn i can tell you mister george if you're talking about hiring a tree i stabilize your income stream so do you think that the entrepreneurial spirit that we have in the country the entrepreneurial we're seeing around this industry coupling with an increase environmental awareness by doe grant and i think a rural development grant in that so i have some questions surrounding that if you will sir i will submit those to you in writing for an answer in writing from native energy and i think it's important for us to look at whether or not this is something that is sustainable and something that is going to be profitable and doable and duplicative so that it can be  question several estimates suggests that the average american family generates twenty tons of carbon dioxide annually and i think about four five for the rest of the automobile that actually generates less greenhouse gas contributors will cost more money do you think that the reverse ought to be the case in the united states in other words that you essentially pay for money if you buy a large emitter if you want a big suv you pay more for that than you would pay for buying a hybrid because right now if you're trying to be environmentally sensitive it costs you more money and so just like cigarettes cost more money if you want to extreme example of an object that somebody might own and they contacted us because they were tied up next to our research ship that's down in florida picking up scientific gear and it's just the most beautiful thing you've ever seen polished to a high polish and the owner of the yacht i was drinking coffee on our research ship one morning and he was drinking coffee on his and we were literally tied together so we could almost touch and he said well tell me about all this carbon sequestration stuff and i said well you tell me about your boat how many gallons research ship you would have to pay about two thousand dollars a year to make that zero by planting trees and he said i just paid more than that to varnish the back rail on this boat and he said let me get can't most people can't afford that but i can afford one hundred dollars a year to do the right thing for the greener solution and that's why the british stern report that talked about the need to spend three dollars to four dollars trillion immediately to solve and address this problem of climate change is such a staggering number it's because they use that engineering metric to come by that number if you use the green metric to come by the cost of making a really in the atmosphere but that's changing now and we have some other competitors out there that are going to at least as good a job as we are of contributing those gases and i think one of our biggest challenges is to work with those other countries to find ways to cooperate toward reducing our footprint and their footprint at the same time what lessons can we learn from the voluntary  system out there in maybe moving toward mandatory systems that could be applied that we could sort of encourage other countries to follow that may be large contributors in the future and i'll take an answer from anyone mister blachford i guess i would just point out that under the kyoto protocol part of the idea of having the offset project type fee based in emerging market precisely to try to stimulate the development of renewal energy and other clean development in those markets because as they mature and as there's increasing demand for energy in those markets it would be nice if it was energy that was renewable instead of energy that's based on fossil fuels so i think that's one very obvious way we can encourage the development of projects in those countries mister george you know every place in europe you go you see an advertisement on the wall put up by some public agency or some been a fantastic success story because its job was to stimulate people to try to think our way and vent our way out of this crisis and we're doing it mister mcnerney it just seems that a market based approach would be the most effective and if we can produce laws that will be useful in encouraging asia in particular to move forward in this it would be good to have that input from the market and from you guys mister george two and a half months ago i was in china meeting with several different chinese government organizations i was given tours around china of the tree planting that's going on there and i'm a tree planter so i know a new tree when i see one i saw twenty five years of extensive tree planting going on there in china china  costa rica are the only two countries on the planet that are ahead of the game on forestry planting more trees than they're clearing every year the chinese are enormously dedicated to climate change solutions they're working on it they are  very insular they don't really talk about it i was amazed when i met with foresters there who were asking me about how to create carbon credits i met with one group about wind power some of these guys here are wind power guys and they  said well can you earn a carbon credit with wind power and i said yeah and i said are you going to put wind power in they said yeah we're looking at two hundred and fifty megawatts right away in one little area and they said can we ear n a carbon credit for that and i said well of course so those countries are in fact actually working on it on the other side of the equation you know they're burning the nastiest coal on earth do you know the mercury that we those chinese coal plants so we have to shut those things down with other means and for other purposes other than strictly climate change mister romm to get to your question i think the rate of development in countries like china and india is going to have to be met with intelligent cap and trade regulations that they're going to have to sign onto to spur clean energy technologies and carbon sequestration i think that they're not going to act i'm sure if you've talked to them you know they're not going to act until we take some action ourselves so i think the first step is the development of u s mandatory regime and then working with them as quickly as possible to get them to develop a mandatory regime mister george you know in china every man woman and child by law in china has to plant five trees per year that's six billion trees per year go in the ground and everywhere in china where you go if you're an old tree planter like me you see that that's going on i see those about what great foresters the chinese are because there was an extensive series of articles or at least one article in the washington post recently about all the illegal logging that's going on in china and despite their rules they're incapable of enforcing them in the provinces so i'm glad that your view on that is a different picture than what we read in the post because that was pretty devastating in terms of the harvest levels there russia indonesia  malaysian other tropic countries where the rain forests are being wiped out so they can ship the wood to china so they can process it into furniture so we can buy it here and feel good about ourselves i guess so i'm glad to hear they're doing more in china than what we us globally to address this issue mister george china the premier of china did commit to about two months when he was visiting with the premier of japan or prime minister of japan that china would be a full compliant member of kyoto because i know they are also committed to do other energy sources but are they using the latest technologies in these new plants that they are putting on line do you know mister romm no i mean they're not and they're using i think by and large they're using pulverized coal which may be very difficult to retrofit to capture carbon i think the top priorities for the united states should be to develop a mandatory regime ourselves just so we have credibility to go to other countries if you've talked to people from china and india you know that they scoff at the notion that the poorer countries shouldn't that the rich countries can't act until the poor countries act mister walden right mister romm but they're going to have to act right after we act so i think we need to do something for our own credibility i also think we have to figure out how to do this technology transfer because they're going to build coal plants mister walden right mister romm and so we have to figure out how to make sure that they build coal plants that can capture carbon and work with them to figure out how and where to sequester it mister walden who among you is sort of up on sequestration because when some of us were in europe earlier this summer we went out to a coal plant where they were working on a sequestration facility although we didn't futuregen which i think is kind of a very slow process that won't demonstrate the successful integration of everything for ten years for sequestration i think frankly a top priority of the federal government should be to a start doing demonstrations projects which i think are occurring but b someone has to go out and identify and certify geologic repositories mister walden right in fact that was an issue that came up in europe they actually have on their books in some countries i'm told antipollution laws and they treat carbon as a pollutant and so they have to modify their law because you can't put pollutants in the ground legally so once they figure out how to sequester carbon they have to fix their law because you're injecting a pollutant into the ground a violation of law the other issue that came up in our discussions was not only how you resolve which could be done but are there other liability issues that could occur does carbon injected in the ground force something else out that you become liable for does it escape at some point and therefore how do you deal with the escape gas if it does are you familiar with any of this mister romm sure the answers to your questions they are all good questions and no one has address around there because it would inundate them with carbon mister romm so people may not be thrilled to have a large carbon dioxide repository in their backyard and i think setting up a certification process  their one minute summation on what it is that you want the select committee to remember from your testimony as we move forward over the course of the next several months and couple of years looking at this issue let's begin with you mister boucher if you would give us your final one minute mister boucher thank you despite our position in the voluntary carbon offsets market i think the one thing we would like to see congress do as soon as possible is a well designed mandatory cap and trade put in place and i think the evolving voluntary market will continue to support that it will help folks get from whatever level is established by mandates to net zero for those who want to get there the other point i wanted to make is that in designing that it has to be very well designed so that the mandatory cap and trade does not strip away the benefits of renewable energy projects in particular in the same way that has occurred on so cap and trading in that basically any reduction from a renewable project goes to the benefit of the utility the utility then has additional allowances it can sell there has to be direct allocation of rights to the renewable energy projects so preserve the voluntary market in that future cap and trade  regime there has been discussion about the gold standard and i would just like to note for the record that we are working with gold standard to bring forward the first gold standard certified project in the u s and we expect that to forming on this issue there are people who are in favor of offsets from biological forestry and other sources and there are people who are sort of in the engineering world and there's a lot of territoriality being expressed and we're not going to solve this problem if we sort of let this thing disintegrate into factions competing factions we really need all of the solutions on the table there simply isn't time to engage sort of prohibitions of certain things because we don't know enough yet when we're trying to prohibit the ability to develop that knowledge we simply need to look at all of the possible solutions as fast as we can and find the ones that work and i think repeat my call earlier for some level of government involvement in forming better and more persistent standards for offset project quality i think it's just essential for this market to really thrive and for these reductions to happen for there to be clear rules of the road my company it's wonderful that we were invited here today but the reality is we're six people sitting in a single room in san francisco trying to make a difference trying to play by the rules and we have to have some rules so we road there i think it is important for congress to not wait until you've passed the mandatory regime to start the process of developing protocols for what are verifiable emissions reductions because that could take two or three four or five years so if we have to wait to let's say two thousand and nine to start that process we may not get those rules for three or four or five years after that so if there is any way you can do some things in parallel over the next two years  just think that would be immensely valuable i will make one final point we do need to figure out a way to preserve tropic forests they are the lungs of the planet and the deforestation that is occurring is catastrophic from a climate and many other points of view i think you have to do that at a nationwide level that's what the u n is moving towards rather than a project based level so i don't want to leave people with the impression that the solution to our fossil fuel problem can be i agree with doctor romm if there's a choice between developing a mandatory program over c and d voluntary market i think the choice the focus should be on a mandatory market program however in the interim period there's a role for the voluntary market play to provide a learning experience in developing these kinds of protocols i think if the federal government does choose to provide some oversight of this market it should build off of the standards and programs that have been developed to date and can either take the form of endorsing one of these programs or providing some explicit guidance on the quantification protocols the verification accreditation of verifiers and the establishment of certification of registries so that we have a consistent carbon offset commodity that people can trust that's what the market needs the chairman thank you mister broekhoff and we thank all of you what i'm going to do on behalf of the select committee is write to the federal trade environmental programs i think that clearly under section five of the federal trade commission act there is a place here for that agency to look to ensure that consumers get what this hearing has been very helpful to us it is i think the first hearing that has been held on this subject and i think that it's something that's very illuminating and can be very helpful in the long run  as long as there are standards which are transparent and understood by the marketplace so with that and the thanks of the select committee this hearing is