Carbon offsetting for your classic car a great idea in principle, but it seems there are a lot of companies out there to profit from your good-natured, green endeavours.
It’s also worth noting that ‘Carbon Offsetting’ as an idea, is simply clever accounting.
Trees can take 20 years to mature before they start sucking up carbon effectively. Then, when those trees die, all that carbon is released back into the atmosphere.
Carbon offsetting just makes you feel good while you keep on polluting, and all you’re doing is making others wealthy from your guilt – we’ll explain this bit further on.
The only real way to reduce your classic car emissions, is to drive it less.
The problem with Hagerty ECO
Hagerty recently launched their Enthusiast Carbon Offset scheme, also known as Hagerty ECO. It pairs the leviathan brand with a little-known UK company called Chrome Carbon. Chrome Carbon offers a calculator (with unknown workings) that provides a seemingly random number for the amount of carbon your classic car emits in 500-mile increments.
Then you’re given the amount of trees which need to be planted to offset all those nasty CO2’s. Again, no workings are given, and their numbers fall flat when even the European Environment Agency states that a mature tree sequesters 22kg of CO2 per year.
That’s without Chrome Carbon taking 20-30% of your money for providing a calculator and passing your dosh onto the charities that plant the trees.
At best, this amounts to dubious business practices backed by one of the biggest names in the classic car insurance world. Unethical at worst.
Hagerty ECO alternatives
Another company partners with a well-known automotive media publishing outlet here in the UK. It’s called Carbon Neutral Britain. They have a very glossy website including animals, emissions, icebergs etc and tons of clients who have all ‘Turned their businesses carbon neutral, thanks to Carbon Neutral Britain’.
But once again, they state that 80% of your funds go to those planting the trees. 10% goes on admin costs and 10% on fundraising and marketing.
Delving into their business structure on Companies House and like Chrome Carbon, this company is also a sole directorship affair. Likely a single-employee one as well. Company accounts show a very healthy ‘Capital and reserves’ figure of £369,000 posted in December 2021 – just a year after the company was formed.
Carbon Neutral Britain has made far more financial headway than Chrome Carbon. But the principle of skimming 20% of your money, which you’re paying to offset your emissions, gets kept by the company for passing on your money to the charities that do the work.
So what’s the alternative?
Classic car carbon offset alternatives
Our view is that climate change isn’t an opportunity to make money. So we set about creating our own scheme so that you can offset the CO2 emissions of your classic car or daily and give 100% of the money you’re ponying up to the charities that are physically going out and planting the trees.
We call it Ethical Carbon Offset, or Carwitter ECO for short. Catchy right?
To get the same numbers as similarly branded schemes, we reversed the figures and got as near as dammit to their unknown calculations. We tell you our workings, but they aren’t based on science…just on how the other calculator works.
Select your type of vehicle, pop your MPG into the other box, and set the slider to the correct mileage. Done.
We then tell you the correct amount of trees that need to be planted (it’s pretty scary, actually) to offset all those nasties. You can click one of two links and donate the correlating amount directly to the charities.
It’s all free. We don’t take a penny from you. We’re acting as an ethical middleman and pairing your desire to offset your classic car emissions with the people who can do that for you.
Calling out greenwashing
If you know of any other companies that see carbon offsetting and climate change as a money-making scheme, please do get in touch. We’d love to feature them on this page.
