PRESS RELEASE

November 9, 2000

Energy Company Buys Carbon Credits
In Conserved California Redwood Forest

Santa Rosa, CA – In the first transaction of its kind in the United States, carbon emission reduction credits attributable to the conservation and good management of forests have been sold to an energy-providing company seeking to offset carbon dioxide emissions, the Pacific Forest Trust announced today.

Green Mountain Energy Company, a Texas-based energy provider that sells power blends from cleaner and renewable sources, purchased the credits as a way to mitigate C02 emissions related to its corporate activities, including electrical power used in its offices and fuel used in business travel and employee commuting.

The carbon stored in living forests under the purchase from the non-profit Pacific Forest Trust is equivalent to nearly 2,500 tons of CO2, or about half the emissions associated with Green Mountain’s corporate activities, company officials said. The proceeds from this sale will contribute to the conservation of about 5,000 acres of forestland on which PFT controls carbon rights, including a redwood forest in San Mateo County, California.

"Such transactions have occurred internationally, but our focus is balancing the carbon budget at home," said Laurie Wayburn, President of the Pacific Forest Trust. "These projects can be done just as cost-effectively here as overseas. In the United States we can make forest carbon projects permanent and enforceable."

Levels of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, are still rising in the earth’s atmosphere. Conserving forests helps counter this trend, because trees absorb CO2 and store it as biomass over centuries and millennia. Forest loss and unsustainable management, on the other hand, are the second largest source of world CO2 emissions, surpassed only by the burning of fossil fuels.

"When you save a forest from loss you avoid significant carbon emissions. And when you improve forest management, you further increase the storage of carbon," Ms. Wayburn said.

By helping to fund conservation easements on older, private forestlands such as those in the Butano Creek drainage of San Mateo County, Green Mountain is paying for the increased storage of carbon in forests protected by such conservation easements.

"Green Mountain Energy Company’s focus is to reduce CO2 emissions at their source by causing renewable energy to be built. This project complements our goal by reducing the consequences that our daily business activities have on the environment," said Tom Rawls, the company’s chief environmental officer.

Roger Ballentine, chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force, praised the deal. "I commend the Pacific Forest Trust and Green Mountain Energy Company for showing that addressing climate change is good for both our economy and the environment," Ballentine said. "By protecting precious forests and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this effort is improving our environment for our children and grandchildren."

The Santa Rosa-based Pacific Forest Trust, founded in 1993, is a regional conservation organization dedicated to preserving private productive forestlands. A central PFT goal is to help landowners derive financial return from conservation and stewardship. By selling the carbon gained from older forests, PFT helps pay landowners for forest conservation.

"This is a big step forward for the protection of California’s working forests, especially our redwood forests, which store more carbon than any other kind," said the state’s Secretary of Resources, Mary Nichols. "This groundbreaking transaction, and the forest carbon market it helps create in California, could bring great benefits to the state’s forest economy, and to the state’s important forest ecosystems."

Restoring forests to an older and more diverse condition provides many co-benefits, Ms. Wayburn noted. The lands providing the carbon emission reduction credits to Green Mountain Energy Company also contain important habitat for threatened and endangered species such as Pacific salmon, steelhead, marbled murrelet and spotted owls.

This transaction is timely in view of the sixth meeting of the Conference of the Parties, scheduled for mid-November in the Hague as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Negotiations among participants at "COP 6" will include discussions of the role of forests in sequestering carbon and mitigating climate change.

The Pacific Forest Trust believes that forestlands in the path of development are especially in need of protection, since they are in danger of being permanently lost to residential or other development. California is losing 77,000 acres of forestland each year, and the Butano Creek lands are close to the encroaching sprawl of Silicon Valley.