welcome, inquisitor!

Verify our allowance holdings and transactions yourself.

If pork links are all soy, the sausage maker ends up in court. Ultra Civic reduces emissions by locking up pollution allowances forever. If we knowingly sell locked-up 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 — so you might wonder if you have done something good or bad. You have done something good. Here is 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. We do. Coal is cheap for them and expensive for us. If they had to pay the full cost of every ton of carbon they emit, the dissonance would disappear — and they would burn less coal. In other words, some of the electricity they generate today does more harm than good. If they paid for their emissions, they would generate less of the bad and more of the good electricity.

States in the Northeast make them pay by requiring them to buy pollution allowances. Now, in 2025, every short ton of carbon they emit damages us by $118 to $327 . But what they actually pay — the allowance price — is only $20 to $26. This means there are too many allowances, and they are polluting 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. Yesterday, you bought an allowance and locked it up. Today, our wobbly politicians decide to free power plants from the tyranny of allowances — starting next year. This is a stretch, since the allowance system is run by ten states, not the federal government. But we live in 2025: anything is possible. Would yesterday's climate action still have an impact?

If power plants will use every available allowance before next year — yes. They would have used the allowance you locked up to emit a ton of carbon, so you still made them cut one ton of emissions. If, instead, power plants have more allowances than they need to make it to next year — no. They emit the same amount of carbon whether or not you bought an allowance and locked it up. :(

At their current rate of emissions, power plants would take about a year and a half to burn through all allowances in circulation. If Trump freed power plants from allowances starting 1.5 years from now, your action would likely still have climate impact. If the deadline came sooner, it likely wouldn't.

When you buy a carbon credit, you pay someone who claims to have lowered the amount of carbon in the air by one ton — at some point in the past. When you buy a pollution allowance and lock it up, you make power plants cut future emissions by one ton. With a carbon credit, you hope to encourage future climate action by rewarding past climate action. With power plant allowances, you make future climate action happen.

Another difference: power plants have well-measured emissions, so they demonstrably cut a ton of carbon when you buy an allowance and lock it up, but you would be hard-pressed to measure the impact of many climate actions behind carbon credits. The trees you planted yesterday could burn tomorrow. The solar park you helped fund might have been built without your help. Add this measurement problem to the fact that carbon credit businesses thrive when their stated impact is big — and you get exaggerated claims.

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. With carbon credits, you hope to encourage people to reduce a ton of carbon in the air by rewarding those who claim to have done so in the past. With RECs, you hope to encourage people to generate one renewable megawatt-hour by rewarding those who have done so in the past.

RECs are carrots for renewable generation. Ultra Civic is a stick. With RECs, you make clean generation more lucrative. With Ultra Civic, you make pollution allowances scarcer and make dirty generation more costly. Both incentives push power plants away from fossil fuels. The bonus of buying an allowance and locking it up is that you also cut power plant emissions by a ton. You do not cancel what power plants emitted to power you by purchasing RECs.

Yes. We now enter the primeval land of economics. To lower the amount of carbon in the air, you must change someone's behavior. You can plant a forest yourself, convince someone else to do it, or make power plants burn less fossil fuel. But you cannot control what everyone else does. If wood gets cheaper, more people choose hardwood floors; if natural gas gets cheaper, people eat more stew and less salad. And if people cook more stew, ranchers raise more cows, so…

Once you trace reality's dizzying web of connected behavior, you find the net effect of your climate action. Of course, you never quite get there — general equilibrium effects are inaccessible to mortal men. So — despair? No :) Rather, consider a few important ways that others might respond, and ignore the rest.

At Ultra Civic, we think people at large respond to you buying and locking up an allowance through two channels: lower coal, oil, and gas prices, and higher electricity prices. When you curb power plants' emissions, they demand less fossil fuel and supply less electricity. Fossil fuel prices drop, so others buy and burn more — less than what power plants stopped burning, lest fossil fuel prices rise if power plants buy less of them! At the same time, electricity prices rise. In response, generators that need allowances clean their act to sell more power — they buy cleaner fuel, tune their turbines, or install solar panels. Renewable generators grow. And dirty out-of-state generators send in more power.

Add the emission changes across these responses to the one-ton reduction in power plants' emissions, and you get a decent estimate of your impact on the entire world's carbon emissions.

If no one reacts to your choices, then the claim is precise. You just buy and lock away an amount of allowances equal to what power plants emitted to power you, so an equal amount of smoke simply never leaves another chimney. If people do respond, the claim is less precise.

Say you run servers in Northern Virginia that use ten megawatt-hours of electricity. To meet your power demand, power plants emit three tons of carbon. Did your product add three tons of carbon to the air?

Three tons is probably too much. If you do not launch your product, you do not demand ten megawatt-hours, so electricity becomes cheaper — otherwise, not all of it would be consumed. Since it's cheaper, people buy somewhere between zero and ten megawatt-hours more than they otherwise would have. Your product's emissions equal the difference between the original three tons and what power plants emit to supply this extra electricity.

Overall, others' responses lower your climate impact (see the previous question) and also lower your product's emissions. If the balance is just right — or if neither your product nor your allowance purchases affect energy markets — then yes, you leave no carbon trace. But we cannot confidently say where that balance lies.