Something bothered Canadian environmental officials about the two-day Health and Environment Ministers of the Americas meeting, held in Ottawa in March. It wasn’t the agenda. Rather, it was the fact that activities such as air and ground transport to and from the conference—an environmental meeting, after all—would produce greenhouse-gas emissions. So Canadian officials decided to offset the estimated 1,400 metric tons of CO2 emissions the conference would cause by buying carbon credits from a biomass-energy producer in Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul state. The small, $7,700 project is one of two carbon-offset initiatives announced in Brazil recently. The other, a $5 million World Bank project, involves carbon-credit purchases from a Minas Gerais state pig-iron plant that uses... [Log in to read more]