welcome, inquisitor!

Verify our allowance holdings and transactions yourself.

If pork links are all soy, the sausage maker goes to jail. Ultra Civic reduces emissions by retiring pollution allowances, forever. If we knowingly sell retired allowances—or fail to reasonably prevent bad actors from doing so—we expect to join the sausage maker.

Electricity is good; carbon emissions are bad. When you lower power plants' emissions, you lower both. You might wonder if your action is good or bad. It's good, and here's why.

The damage to us (humanity) from another ton of carbon in the air is one of the costs of generating power from fossil fuels. Power plants do not pay this cost, but we do. Coal is cheap for them and expensive for us. If they paid the full cost of every ton of carbon they emitted, they would burn less coal to generate electricity. It doesn't pay to generate that electricity when they account for the full cost of burning coal. In other words, that electricity does more harm than good.

States in the Northeast make power plants pay for their emissions by requiring them to buy pollution allowances. In short, they pay $20 to emit a short ton of carbon that damages us by $118 to $327 . There are too many cheap allowances that let them pollute too much.

How much is too much? The difference between what they emit and what they would emit if they had to pay $118–$327 per allowance. Until allowance prices hit that range, every ton of carbon you make them cut is a ton of carbon they would cut if they cared about us.

What If Trump (WITTY) questions are fun. First off, this would be hard to do: the pollution allowance system is the law in ten states. Still, suppose that Washington somehow pulls this off. Yesterday, you retired an allowance. Today, the states announce that power plants won't need allowances after December 2026—the end of the current 2024-2026 compliance period. Whether your retirement actually cuts emissions depends on how many allowances the power plants are sitting on.

If they have less than they need, they will use every one before 2027 and your retirement makes them emit one less ton than they otherwise would have. If they have more than they need, they would not have used your allowance, so emissions stay unchanged. At their current emissions rate, their stockpile would last about a 1.5 years. So we can't say which outcome is more likely to happen in mid-2025.

Now the silver lining. Allowances become worthless if power plants have more than they need, which is great. You can buy them for pennies and retire them in bulk until power plants face a shortage once again. In fact, you would be able to stop tons of carbon for much less than $20. So, either your allowance retirement worked, or the system's death causes a fire-sale where we can stop carbon emissions for cheap.

When you buy a renewable energy certificate (REC), you pay someone who generated one megawatt-hour of electricity from renewable sources—at some point in the past. RECs are carrots for renewable generation; Ultra Civic is a stick. RECs fund renewable energy hoping to displace fossil-fuel power plants. With Ultra Civic, you displace them by removing their rights to pollute. Here's the research that shows how RECs' hope is just… hope.

Like all carbon credits, our credits are tokens that incentivize climate action. Your typical carbon credit funds third-party climate actions with uncertain results (e.g. trees may burn), audited by biased intermediaries. Ultra Civic's carbon credits fund you to stop emissions by retiring allowances, and the Federal Government monitors (since 1992).

Ultra Civic also ends the Great Carbon Credit Confusion. Somehow, it is commonplace to get a carbon credit and claim a 1 ton CO₂ impact. In truth, demanding more credits (or restricting supply by retiring them) simply raises their prices, so the people taking climate action earn more money. How much more CO₂ they capture in response, you cannot know.

We give you two options: stop one ton of emissions by retiring an allowance and earn a carbon credit; or buy carbon credits to incentivize others to retire allowances. Carbon credits make it profitable for others to retire allowances, so they're essential to stop lots of emissions. We just won't tag them with a made-up climate impact.

Certainly. We think that people respond to you retiring an allowance through lower fossil fuel prices and higher electricity prices. When you retire an allowance, dirty power plants have to burn less fossil fuel and supply less electricity. Since power plants demand less fossil fuel, it becomes cheaper, and others buy more of it. Since power plants supply less electricity, it becomes more expensive, and other generators (both renewable and out-of-state) produce more of it. Overall, your impact on the entire world's carbon emissions is likely lower than your one-ton impact on power plants.

Such higher-order effects are ubiquitous in climate action. To lower the amount of carbon in the air, you have to change someone's behavior. You can convince someone to plant some trees; you can make power plants burn less fossil fuel. But you cannot control how others react. If there's more wood, wood gets cheaper and more people choose hardwood floors; if power plants use less natural gas, gas gets cheaper and people crank up their heating in winter.

No one can affect the entire world's harmful carbon emissions—we can simply try to make as many people stop as much as possible.

Say you used some electricity, and power plants emitted a ton of carbon to meet your power demand. You retire an allowance, making Northeastern power plants cut a ton of carbon. Is the air as clean as if you did not use that electricity?

Here's why there's nuance. First, your power demand increases carbon emissions by less than a ton. If you did not use that electricity, power generators would cut emissions by less than a ton: the demand for electricity would be lower, electricity prices would be lower, and others would use more of it. Second, retiring an allowance lowers the entire world's carbon emissions by less than a ton (see the previous question). To leave exactly no carbon trace, the balance needs to be just right, e.g., if your power consumption and allowance retirement simply do not affect the market prices of fossil fuels and electricity.