Madame Madeline, LLC ("Madame Madeline") proudly makes carbon-neutrality a priority by purchasing premium offsets Renewable Energy Credits (also known as “Green Tags) product from NativeEnergy.com. We do our part to slow global warming and help reduce our environmental impacts associated with conventional day to day business energy use. We use the clean energy environmental benefits to compensate, “offset”, the CO2 pollution from energy sources that don’t come from renewable energy.

Effective 2007, Madame Madeline is "carbon negative' by participating in local recycling programs and by purchasing twice the amount of our total carbon footprints, offsetting twice the amount of carbon than we use. In 2008 and 2009, Madame Madeline purchased three times the amount of our total carbon footprints, offsetting three times the amount of carbon.

The New Oxford American Dictionary has just declared Carbon Neutral its word of the year, for 2006.

“The increasing use of the word carbon neutral reflects not just the greening of our culture, but the greening of our language. When you see first graders trying to make their classrooms carbon neutral, you know the word has become mainstream.”

What is Carbon Neutral you ask? Basically, you start by calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions, from things like your car, your home energy, and your air travel. This number is often referred to as your Carbon Footprint. You then reduce your emissions where possible, by driving / flying less, and turning off, or unplugging everything you can.

After that, you offset any remaining emissions through things like Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). By buying RECs, you are substituting the amount of dirty energy you use (like coal), with clean energy (like solar or wind).

The final result is Carbon Neutral, and if you’re very ambitious, you can strive for Carbon Negative, which is essentially offsetting more carbon than you use. It’s a goal that we should all strive for.

You can purchase RECs from a variety of companies. I personally like TerraPass and NativeEnergy. As a side-note, NativeEnergy is the company that offsets all of Al Gore’s carbon associated with his travel, in addition to the carbon associated with An Inconvenient Truth (movie and book).

Please, if you’re not already carbon neutral (or negative), make that a priority. If first graders can do it, then the rest of us have no excuse.

You too can help reducing the amount of energy you use and build new clean and renewable energy projects with NativeEnergy or TerraPass. With NativeEnergy or TerraPass, you’ll reduce CO2 pollution by helping change how our power is made.

Participate now at http://www.nativeenergy.com or http://www.cooldriver.org