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via:: Good Clean Tech

For only $6 per month, you can offset the carbon footprint from your home gas use by investing in poo.

Poo, you ask? Yup, poo. Cow (or any of our 4-stomached friend’s) manure releases methane when it breaks down. Methane is the least talked about but blackest sheep of the Greenhouse Gas family. It is 23 times more powerful as a global warming agent than carbon dioxide, and while CO2 emissions have risen 30% since the industrial revolution, methane levels have jumped up an unprecedented %150 in the same time.

But this still doesn’t explain how you can use it to offset your emissions. Easy: you catch it, dear Liza. And that is exactly what NW Natural, a natural gas supplier from Oregon is going to do, with the help of The Climate Trust.

The idea is that customers sign up and pay a small premium which will be used to fund small-scale methane capture projects. The projects will not only benefit the customer by “offsetting” their carbon footprint (although no firm numbers are given by the company), it will benefit the cattle farmers.

The large herds that are now standard in farming mean that farmers are often left with more manure than they can use, or dispose of safely. The result is a big, smelly mess. But by installing the digestors used for methane capture, the farmer is left with compost and enough methane to potentially provide all of the power requirements for the farm.

Farm methane capture, in my opinion, is the most common sense and immediately beneficial technologies available to combat climate change. Unfortunately they are prohibitively expensive to install.

Now with the help of companies like NW Natural, cost might cease to be a barrier to saving the planet.