Who does not want to save the planet especially if you can earn money doing it? After all the fires in the western United States, I was curious if I could plant trees and sell carbon credits. I did some digging and found out some really interesting stuff.
Someone can earn money planting trees and earning carbon credits but a third-party verification process has to approve it. The more acres of forested land you own the more money you can earn.
Keep reading and I’ll share 2 ways to farm carbon credits from trees, how carbon credits work, 3 ways the average person can earn money going green, and 4 ways to make money with carbon credits.
How Carbon Credits Work
Every business and even person has a carbon footprint. Some people feel when carbon enters the atmosphere it creates climate change.
This climate change then can produce more extreme weather, which is NOT cool but hot right? Extreme weather sucks.
What did the tornado say to the sports car? Do you want to go for a spin today?
It’s VERY hard for a business to completely eliminate its carbon footprint so it pays money for people to do this. It pays for carbon credits.
Other businesses create the credits for doing things that take carbon out of the atmosphere. You know save the planet type of stuff.
If a business reduces its carbon footprint then it’s rewarded by saving money on these credits. This program also incentives people to take carbon out of the atmosphere.
Thus everyone wins. The atmosphere wins by being greener, the business wins by outsourcing its carbon reduction, and the person who creates the carbon credit wins by getting paid.
The cool thing is you can get paid from this, save the planet and make your family proud.
How to Earn Carbon Credits Planting Trees
There are some carbon credit programs that will pay for planting trees BUT some have a strict verification process. This verification process includes.
- Insuring that the trees would not have been planted anyways.
- Making sure the land would change in the future.
- Also, making sure that the land change does create uninteded carbon emissions from other sources. An example would be trucks that deliver the trees (I guess you have to plant the trees).
It also costs money to go through this verification process. Due to ALL these hurdles, a normal person (will a small yard) can’t get paid to plant trees in carbon credits.
The good news is there are programs that reduce these requirements and are less strict.
One program I have found has NO acre requirement, but realistically you should have some land. This program walks you through how to earn carbon credits for your forest land and how to sell it.
If you have at least 1 acre of forested land then you can probably sell carbon credits for cash. You can learn more about this program from this link HERE.
Other programs that I’ve looked at required hundreds of acres of land. I’m glad there is a program that reduces this requirement.
Oh, but if you have over 30 acres then you might want to look at this program HERE, I read in some forums that they pay more money, but you have to qualify.
Interesting that carbon credit programs from land are VERY similar to ad networks. The programs that pay more you need more visitors (land) than the easier programs to get into.
3 Ways to Earn Money Going Green!
When it comes to earning money going green there are ALL kinds of ways. I honestly think the easiest way to earn money saving the planet is with affiliate marketing and/or blogging.
Yea, all you have to do is research topics you’re interested in and then share what you learned. You can do it with a blog, Youtube channel, or even social media.
Some programs pay some decent money. In fact, that is what I’m doing here. If you’re interested in earning money this way then I would recommend checking this out.
The second way to earn money going green is to go green yourself. This reminds me of the saying…
If everyone swept their own backyard the whole world would be clean!
Tai Lopez
A very interesting way to make money and save the planet is with batteries. If a battery goes into a landfill then the chemicals can soak into the soil and contaminate groundwater.
Bringing an old battery back to life can help everyone including the battery. Your probably thinking I don’t use that many AA batteries, but you would be surprised how many different types of batteries you use. You can learn more about how to save the environment with batteries by clicking on the link HERE.
There really are TONS of ways you can save money going green. There are things like starting a garden, turning off lights when you’re not in a room, unplug appliances when not in use.
Heck, you could even try eating 1 meal a day (which I do at times). There are also many health benefits to cutting out meals.
Here is a list of a bunch of things you can do to save money and go green. Knowing what to do is 1 thing and doing it is 99% of the battle right?
The next thing you can do is harness the power of the sun. Now, I “really” geeked out on this topic looking at DIY (Do It Yourself) solar panels to large companies and even small handheld devices.
One idea that looked interesting was this DIY project on building solar panels. It looks cool, right?
The bad news is if you want to charge your home you also need a transfer switch and have an electrition install it. This can cost between $500 to $1,500 dollars. Also, I’m skeptical about how much electricity it will deliver.
Still, it doesn’t take a lot of space and you can move it around. Also, you don’t need a battery pack with it. How this would work is when you get energy from solar you’re saving money, when it’s nighttime then you draw from the grid.
When it comes to installing solar panels on your roof there are 2 options. The first option is when the solar company owns the panels and takes a share of the profit from the electricity that is generated. This means NO upfront cost on your end.
The second option is when you buy the system outright and keep more of the profit. The problem with this is there is a large upfront cost.
Sadly, after looking there isn’t anything that I feel comfortable recommending. If you find something “really good” let me know.
The cool thing about putting solar panels on your home is you can get a tax write-off. The 3rd way to earn money going green is by investing. If you’re not sure where to start like me one idea is an ETF fund that does this.
An ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) is a group of stocks, commodities or bonds. An ETF is similar to a mutual fund but the mutual fund usually has higher fees and is managed by a “big shot.”
If you are bullish on clean energy you could look into ICLN or ishares global clean energy index. This fund focuses on alternative energy like solar, wind and hydro (think of the Hoover Dam).
The next idea is to invest directly in carbon credits. You could go to an exchange like this one HERE and buy them then over time, hopefully, they will be worth more.
Another idea is to invest in an ETF fund that deals with carbon credits. One fund you can look into is the Kraneshares Global Carbon ETF or KRBN.
It’s a new fund but could be worth looking into. Also, just look at how the price has been moving up.
Conclusion
I’m very bullish on green energy and anything to do with going green. In the future, this industry will probably ONLY grow and there is definitely money to be made.
Also, Elon Musk is heavy in this space as well as outer space.
There really are TONS of ways to make money saving the planet. Around a year ago I was listening to a Planet Money podcast and it was about a small business that found OLD refrigerators and recycled them for carbon credits. They then sold the carbon credits for cash to fund the business.
It’s a fascinating business and freon from old refrigerators is horrible for the environment. You can check out this podcast and transcript by clicking on the link HERE.
I hope this post on planting trees and selling carbon credits was helpful to you. Bye for now.