Norway mall offers shoppers greenhouse gas credits

By John Acher

OSLO (Reuters) - Half a kg of salmon; two kg of potatoes; a tonne of greenhouse gas reductions -- shoppers at one Norwegian mall can now buy cuts in their carbon footprint as they pick up their weekly groceries.

The Stroemmen Storsenter shopping centre outside Oslo began selling the certificates on Saturday, at 165 Norwegian crowns ($30.58) per tonne, to people who feel bad about contributing to climate change.

By midday on Monday, its second day of offering the U.N.-approved Certified Emissions Reductions, it had sold more than a third of the 1,000 CERs on offer and would consider buying more if they sell out, the mall's managers said.

They said the certificates were bought by private individuals and by small firms wanting them for their employees.

One CER corresponds to a tonne of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions reductions via the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows those in rich countries to invest in emissions cutting projects in developing nations and count the cuts as their own.

Each Norwegian accounts for about 11 tonnes of greenhouse gases every year, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

"Many people want to buy reductions, but until we started this in the shopping mall, they haven't known where to get them, but now they are available to everybody," said Ole Herredsvela, the shopping centre's technical manager.

"We are doing this also to create awareness among people towards the problem (of climate change)," he said.