Turning trees' carbon into silver

Scott Nissenbaum doesn't consider himself a tree hugger. But his appreciation for a leafy canopy goes well beyond shade.

In the stands of elms, cottonwoods, maples, birches, and pines that help form the 747 million acres of U.S. forestland, he sees profit.

Not in helping landowners cut trees down for sale as lumber. But in helping them continue to nurture their woods and make money off the carbon sequestered there - the carbon dioxide taken up through photosynthesis and stored in the trees' trunks, branches, foliage, and roots.

The national push for climate-change initiatives, coupled with falling timber prices and a growing demand for protecting and regenerating forests for the good of the environment, has helped create "a tidal wave of momentum" in the forest-carbon market, Nissenbaum said.

He hopes to ride that wave to profitability while doing something good for the environment through Finite Carbon, the Wayne company Nissenbaum, formerly with Novitas Capital, founded in February with another venture capitalist, Robert Verratti.

Until April 2007, Verratti headed Wayne-based Traffic.com Inc., a commercial supplier of digitally gathered traffic data. He is Finite Carbon's chief executive officer; Nissenbaum is its president.

The company helps owners of forestland determine the carbon-capture value, if any, of their towering assets and provides the capital to finance the expensive, complex, and time-consuming process of evaluating, registering, marketing, and selling those carbon offsets.

That cost is typically close to $200,000, but could exceed $1 million on tracts of more than 100,000 acres, Nissenbaum said.

Largely untested in the United States, forest-carbon offsets are a source of concern among environmentalists. They worry offsets will be overused or abused, with credits going to owners who were not considering clear-cutting or whose land does not matter much in the overall national carbon footprint.

There is also concern that trading carbon credits will supplant what environmentalists really want - a full-scale assault on greenhouse-gas emissions.

"It can't be looked at as a silver bullet," said Nathan Willcox, an energy and clean-air expert for PennEnvironment, a nonprofit advocacy group. "We need to be cutting global-warming pollution at its source, versus just finding new places to put the pollution once it's created."