AUSTIN, Tex. — Peering behind a bathtub in a newly built house, an inspector, John Umphress, spotted a big gap in the wall insulation. “Somebody took a lunch break!” he complained to the builder, who sheepishly agreed to patch the hole.

With the fix, the house, already a model of energy efficiency, will use even less energy and save its residents money — for decades.

But that small catch would not have been made in many American towns. Mr. Umphress is a particular kind of inspector, an energy auditor, and Austin, with one of the toughest building codes in the country, requires an energy inspection before a building can be occupied.

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Though most people probably think of national parks when they think of forests, more than half of the 750 million acres of forestland in the United States is actually privately owned, much of it by individuals and families, according to the American Forest Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy organization.

Together, these trees suck up about 10 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, a portion that could double to almost 20 percent with increased sustainable management practices like replanting cut trees and lengthening cut rotations.

But many of these family-owned lands are small—a few hundred acres in size. Alone, these small plots don’t sequester much carbon. This makes it difficult for forest owners to participate in voluntary carbon markets, which typically trade carbon by the tens of thousands of tons. In addition, private owners often can’t afford to inventory and verify the amount of carbon sequestered by their forest on their own.

That’s why there’s growing interest in packaging small parcels of forestland into carbon portfolios that can then be traded competitively on voluntary markets.

View Complete Text: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-08-12-northwest-landowners-market-forest-offsets/

I have been a customer of Central City Air for the past 8 years. Two years ago, I had my garage apartment finished out as a family/media room and Central City Air designed and installed the air conditioning, a Fujitsu mini-split ductless system.

The system failed while still under warranty. They made a repair but it failed again several months later. Central City Air concluded the evaporator coil and air handler should be replaced under warranty.

It took Central City Air more than four months (through the summer heat) to install the replacement parts. After the installation, they left an 8″ by 10″ hole in my wall for me to repair and sent me a $660 bill for the labor on installing the replacement parts which were under warranty.