Making good on our promise

Posted October 21st, 2007 at 9:01 pm by Chris Page, Director, Climate and Energy Strategy

 13 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News, Yahoo! For Good

When Yahoo! committed to going carbon neutral in April, we knew it would be a global initiative. It was only appropriate that on my first day as Yahoo!’s director of climate and energy strategy – before moving my belongings from my life in Boulder, Colorado – I found myself on a plane headed for Western Brazil to check out some small hydropower projects. Things haven’t slowed down much since then.

After much due diligence, Yahoo! has decided to offset its 250 thousand metric ton carbon footprint from 2006 through hydropower in rural Brazil and wind turbines in India. We’ve partnered with EcoSecurities and CantorCO2e, who helped us source, vet, and execute these projects.

What does 250 thousand metric tons look like? Think of taking 35,000 cars off the road for a year, or turning off the lights on the Vegas strip for two months.

We wanted to set a strong standard for approaching this emerging marketplace and developed this checklist to guide us:

• Support high-quality carbon offset projects in areas where Yahoo! has a local presence.
• Find uniquely Yahoo! ways to give back to the communities that benefit from our projects.
• Ensure that the projects we support are verifiable.
• Be as transparent as possible about our process.

After two days of bumpy travel by plane, car, smaller plane and truck, we reached the community of Catorce de Abril, a small village in the state of Rondonia, 1,400 miles northwest of Sao Paulo. It’s powered by the Primavera hydropower project, which produces the offsets that Yahoo! has purchased. This is a small run-of-river dam, which means it uses natural flow and elevation drop to generate electricity. Although hydropower is common in Brazil as a whole, much of this region receives its power from state-subsidized diesel plants. Investing in a clean power project here seemed critical and timely.

Electricity is new to Catorce de Abril. Only recently, the village school was powered by a small diesel generator – dirty, noisy, threatening to young lungs, and not very reliable. And not surprisingly, the school has no computers – classroom materials are copied on a 1970’s-era mimeograph and the nearest Internet connection is an hour away. Yahoo! has committed to connecting the school to the Web and supplying computers and digital cameras that both students and residents can use to reach beyond their village, provide a window into their community via Flickr, and foster an open exchange of ideas.

Almost 10,000 miles away, Yahoo! is partnering with local businesses to purchase offsets from 43 750-kilowatt wind turbines in Vankuswade, Maharashtra, in western India and Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu, in southern India. This investment was particularly important to us, as India is one of the most carbon-producing regions in the world. With our rapidly growing presence in India, we felt a sense of responsibility to encourage the development and use of cleaner energy there. And we‘re exploring various community programs that will support and empower residents of these communities.

We know the issue of global warming is top of mind for our consumers and employees. The top questions in our internal company “question of the week” queue have been about all things green. Yahoo! is committed to being an environmentally responsible business and hopes our approach encourages our industry peers, users and employees to engage, take action, and make their own positive impacts.

Chris Page
Director of Climate and Energy Strategy

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13 Comments Add your own

Sandip Bhattacharya | October 22nd, 2007 at 3:35 am

A raging debate in India and other countries is about how clean hydro(or hydel) power actually is. Granted it doesn’t use smoking coal turbines, but what about the environmental impact of setting up the dams in the first place? Big dam projects in India have submerged millions of acres of valuable forest land and displaced hundreds of thousands of tribals whose livelihood depended on those forests.

I admit I do not have much of an idea of how carbon credits are calculated, and therefore I would like to know whether such calculations include the cost of setting up these power generating infrastructure(the environmental impact) or are they just about running costs(which doubtless, hydro power is quite clean).

Alexis Kauffmann | October 22nd, 2007 at 6:22 am

As a Brazilian citizen I must say THANK YOU for the initiative! We have a long way to go on environmental awareness here and help from companies like Yahoo are always welcome.

Glenn Hurowitz | October 22nd, 2007 at 8:23 am

Big kudos to Yahoo for taking this step. I hope in the future though you’ll dedicate your carbon neutrality dollars to protecting tropical forests (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/opinion/16powers-hurowitz.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

You’ll not only be doing something good for the climate, but you’ll also be protecting disappearing biodiversity. I was really surprised that of all the projects to choose in Brazil, you chose hydropower when the real thing driving Brazil’s skyrocketing emissions is deforestation (it’s deforestation, not diesel generators attached to little schools that makes Brazil the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases). And you’ll be able to put forests and monkeys and leopards on your promotional materials instead of a super-ugly dam (though some attractive Yahoo workers are good :)

But good general idea!

Chris Page | October 22nd, 2007 at 11:28 am

@Sandip: Thanks for your comments. We carefully assessed over 100 projects and specifically selected small-scale run-of-river hydropower in Brazil (like powering 10,000 US households). In contrast to large-scale hydropower dams (the Itaipu dam in Brazil could power all households in Arizona, Los Angeles, and New York City), our project has limited environmental impact and involves no community displacement. Our projects are also in compliance with eligibility for the CDM (clean development mechanism) of the Kyoto protocol, which requires hydro projects to be small-scale to avoid most of the environmental concerns associated with large-scale hydropower dams.

@Glenn: While combating deforestation is crucial, we recognize there are some uncertainties around claiming forestry projects for carbon offsets at this time (particularly when it involves predicting what will happen to a tree in the future). Yahoo! has chosen to focus its offset purchases on clean energy projects that were predictably verifiable and provided an opportunity to empower a community to use clean energy at a time when its adoption was critical. Thanks for your feedback.

gag | October 23rd, 2007 at 1:22 pm

wow! Salute!! yahoo!

sol@rion | October 26th, 2007 at 12:43 pm

I think whole world will thank you for your efforts. It is not who does the best, it is what we do, even a minuscule effort. It certainly is better than doing nothing.
By stepping up to the challenge and I hope others will follow the suit.
Sol@rion

Ajith | November 3rd, 2007 at 3:32 am

Readers are invited to check their ecological footprint at http://www.myfootprint.org

matt | November 5th, 2007 at 9:13 am

What great offset projects!! I am very glad that you didn’t do any offsetting with planting trees!

Larry D. Bemiss | November 6th, 2007 at 3:32 pm

Hello
I’m sure you won’t print this but I’ll write it just the same. I read today where you intentionally gave up a Chinese dissident to the Chinese government. The man got 10 years in prison for your cowardice.
The all mighty bottom line is worth more to you than imprisoning a man for speaking out for freedom. Think about that for a moment. Thousands and thousands of Americans have given their blood and their lives for freedom and Yahoo’s right to do business in a free country and Yahoo can’t even give up some cash. And now you have the balls to fight his family over even less money. I had better hear in the news where you paid them 10’s of millions. If not, I have no further use for yahoo. Mind you, I make my living from the yahoo groups some 100 k per year. I’ll dump that and you if you don’t take care of these people, but not before using yahoo and any other medium I can to tell as many people about your cowardice as possible.
Shame on you
What a terrible thing to do to a man, his family, and to freedom…..

Nina Katchadourian | January 5th, 2008 at 5:42 am

Chris! Fellow Milhouser!
I apologize for the personal post here–couldn’t find any other way to reach you. It’s fantastic to see what you are up to. Will you send me your regular email?
Happy New Year.
xo
NK

Berenike Hartmann | July 23rd, 2008 at 12:29 am

Hi! I follow this whole thing closely and am also very glad to see that there’s no tree planting involved. A very good source for carbon credits is one of our Australian companies here, the Carbon Reduction Institute: http://www.noco2.com.au. They have comprehensive info on actions businesses like Yahoo could take, even on a global scale. By the way, Australia is finally getting an emissions trading scheme now! With Yahoo taking the lead, might there be a chance for the US to follow suit? The kind of action I want to see is global. And global companies should take the lead, we can’t sit this out and wait for the governments. Kudos to Yahoo!

Abi | February 13th, 2009 at 11:42 pm

Just an initiative that big names like Yahoo have to take. I am happy to see this and ofcourse this entire global village will be happy to see yahoo’s efforts!

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | May 6th, 2009 at 1:52 am

I think it is important to give back, and to invest in carbon neutral projects in countries where Yahoo! has a presence makes good sense

Are you still filling this position, Chris? And do you have any further updates for us?