New York businessman Attila Kelemen is a quiet environmentalist. "I'm not the kind of guy who would jump in a boat with Greenpeace," says the soft-spoken project-management director for the advertising agency Draftfcb, "but I have always wanted to do my part."
For Kelemen, doing his part meant signing up for the new Brighter Planet Visa card, the latest of three credit cards from US companies that offer investments in projects to offset carbon emissions as rewards.
With businesses large and small looking for ways to "green" their image, and consumers flocking to green products, the major credit card companies are rushing to offer affinity cards that allow consumers to help fight global warming as they spend.
General Electric Co. was the first, offering its Earth Rewards MasterCard in July. Cardholders get a chance to channel up to 1 percent of their net spending into greenhouse gas emission-reduction projects, with a second (and more popular) option allowing them to give only half and get half cash back.
Fintura Corp. followed in August, with Green Pay, a MasterCard that offers cardholders carbon credits on the Chicago Carbon Exchange market.
Bank of America Corp., which already boasts over 5,000 affinity credit cards worldwide, teamed up with a Vermont start-up, Brighter Planet, to issue the Brighter Planet Visa last month.
Brighter Planet invests an unspecified percentage of cardholder spending in renewable-energy projects. For every $1,000 spent, a cardholder offsets one ton of carbon emissions, roughly the amount emitted in heating the average home for a month or driving the average car 2,000 miles.
Spearheaded by another Vermont company, Native Energy, the projects range from cow-powered "remooable" methane abatement to schoolyard wind turbines. Although Brighter Planet declined to comment on how many cardholders it has so far, it projects offsets in the millions of tons within several years.
Brighter Planet is the brainchild of a Middlebury College economics class project to design a credit card to flight global warming. Two students in the class, Andy Rossmeissl and Jake Whitcomb, continued to work on the project after the class was completed. In 2005, Rossmeissl and Whitcomb, along with their professor, Jon Isham, presented the project at an environmental conference, where it caught the attention of a Bank of America representative. By the summer of 2006, the trio had raised $25,000 from friends, colleagues, and word-ofmouth supporters. The nascent company signed on former American Express Co. executive Patti Prairie as chief executive, and Brighter Planet was born.
In March, Bank of America launched its $20 billion environmental initiative, and began exploring ways to issue what it termed an "environmentally sensitive" credit card.
"We saw Brighter Planet as a very credible organization," said Michael Rhodes, the bank's senior vice president for business development. The two signed a deal this fall, launching the card the week after Thanksgiving.
Sarah Robinson, a Boston writer and mother of three, received her earth-emblazoned Visa card in late November.
"Cruising into the holiday retail season, it seemed like a total win-win," she said. "I haven't used any other card since I got it."
Robinson is also thinking of setting up a profile on Brighter Planet's website, similar to the one she uses on Facebook.
The site enables cardholders to track their carbon footprint by comparing their carbon impact (including information such as the type of car they drive, recent airline flights taken, and general energy consumption patterns) with their carbon offsets. It also allows cardholders to network with other environmentalists.
Mainstream environmentalists like Robinson and Kelemen are the target market for the card, though Brighter Planet hopes it will appeal to more extreme environmentalists, as well.
As Rossmeissl put it, "There are some people who are already making conscious decisions to shrink their carbon footprint all the time, and we want to help bring them the last mile toward carbon neutrality. But we also want to get people on board who really want to do something but either don't have the time or the money to make changes."
If the majority of cardholders aren't changing their lifestyles, however, some environmentalists question whether the affinity cards will have much impact.
Annie Leonard, environmental activist and star of the short film "The Story of Stuff," is both concerned and encouraged by the emergence of such cards.
"I worry that programs that seek to make social change through shopping may inadvertently perpetuate our over-identification as consumers rather than citizens," she said. "Yes, we should shop responsibly when we do shop, but the best place to seek solutions to the climate crisis is in the political arena, not the shopping mall."
Alex Staffen, executive editor for the environmental website WorldChanging.com, isn't sure what the effect of the cards will be, either.
"On the one hand, such cards fund good work that otherwise would go undone," he said. "On the other, they risk encouraging our belief that we only need to change how we buy to change the world, and nothing could be farther from the truth."
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.
