Things unfortunately aren’t always as they appear. The fisrt thing Green Cabs did was go to a third party before we launched and said we are putting together and environmentally friendly taxi company and want to be certified. The problem is that all certification programs take a reduction approach to certification. Therefore the company wanting to be certified needs to provide a baseline and from there set about reducing their footprint. If you don’t reduce your footprint you run the risk of losing your certification.
Therein lies the problem at Green Cabs we selected the lowest emission vehicles available and ran with them. we employed the best practices throughout our offices regarding recycling, waste minimuisation and recycling, energy conservation. This was all put in place from day 1. We employed best practice from day 1. The rub is that doesn’t fit with the way certification programs are set up.
Okay so as I was saying we went along to the certification provider and asked to get certified. Their response to us was you have to have been trading for at least a year first and you have to reduce your emissions from that point on in order to retain your certification. Forget about the fact that we employed best practice.
The certification body we approached none other than Carbon Zero through Land Care Reasearch.

As a further note we Also looked at carbon credits and decided that on the whole they were bollocks, that the projects had already been completed and often didn’t reduce the amount of CO2 produced anyway. A good example of this is windfarms – meridian energy builds a wind farm – does this result in a net reduction in CO2 production through energy generation in New Zealand? In short no. Think of it like this will meridian building a wind farm result in Solid Energy cutting back production using coal or Contact Energy using gas? Of course it won’t.
We decided we make much more of a difference in the world if we planted trees. Think about it if we still had all the rainforests (and other forest and bushland for that matter) would we still have a problem?? possibly not, trees soak up a hell of a lot of CO2. and provide a long list of other benefits such as
providing food & shelter
reversing diversification
moderating climate
providing a habitat for flora and fauna

Imagine if everyone in the world planted just one tree, what a difference that would make (population according to good old wikipedia estimated to be 6.8 billion this year 2009).

The fact is we’d be far better planting more trees around the world and installing windmills on peoples homes so they can generate their own electricity.
The point is that if people think outside of the options that are being put in front of them by the powers that be there are far better solutions out there. We just have to change the way we think and not be so accepting of the options we are being given – Demand more, Demand better. After all it is only our planet we are trying to save and I don’t have another one, Do you?