Plenty of businesses offer to ease your environmental conscience by lightening your wallet. But which ones are legitimate?

The idea is simple: You pay a company, and the company invests the money in environmentally sound technology or practices that reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere. Without actually changing your lifestyle (sorry, too busy), you can feel good about making real reductions in the world’s heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

We’ll return to the theme of carbon offsets often in this blog. In the meantime, one organization trying to get a handle on it is the Environmental Defense Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental group. The EDF offers a list of 11 offset  programs at CarbonOffsetList.org it says offer legitimate greenhouse gas reductions.

The list doesn’t identify scammers, but it does list companies the group says its experts have cleared as legitimate.

These offsets are mostly aimed at business owners, who are increasingly interested in becoming “carbon neutral”: using offsets to reduce to nothing the amount of carbon they contribute to the world’s climate. Consumers also buy the offsets.

“What we’re trying to do is bring an independent voice, so the buyer has a source of information other than the person trying to sell them the credits,” says Ron Luhur, a carbon market specialist for the Environmental Defense Fund.

And the group avoids listing projects that seek to reduce carbon emissions with alternative energy, even wind or solar power.

Luhur says they are difficult to verify in terms of greenhouse gas reductions.

Brokering carbon offsets is a burgeoning field, however, and many offsets do involve alternative energy production, says Paul Burman of Carbonfund.org, which helps match buyers to sellers.

“Everyone has their personal preferences,” Burman said. “All our renewable energy are verified by third party sources.”

Such verification has helped tame the carbon offsets market; the Environmental Defense Fund requires it, too, for companies that want to appear on their list.

Still, there is something of a wild west atmosphere in the carbon offset world. “The market is going to have some confusion because the government is not actually going to step in and say what is right and what is wrong,” Burman said.

Federal oversight is needed, he said. “People want the government to be regulating it; they want federal action on these issues,” he said. “The government is not stepping up.”

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