Corporate Mission

3Degrees' mission is to mitigate the effects of climate change by accelerating the development of the low-carbon renewable energy economy.

3Degrees is not alone in this mission — there are thousands of technology and service firms around the world who are trying realize this mission as well.

However, unlike most of these firms, 3Degrees helps make a poorly understood but extremely powerful tool for accelerating low-carbon renewable energy development — environmental markets — more intelligent, efficient and reliable.

Environmental markets, and the commodities traded in these markets, such as Renewable Energy Certificates (otherwise known as RECs) and verified carbon offsets, provide a flexible, market-based mechanism to encourage renewable energy development and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

More than fifty environmental markets exist in the U.S. and around the world today. These environmental markets have proven that they can and do work, and can be very effective in the effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.

For example:

• The U.S. SOx and NOx market has dramatically reduced acid rain in the U.S. at a cost much lower than predicted, leading The Economist to name it “probably the greatest green success story” of the 1990s.
• In the book Pricing Carbon, MIT and International Energy Agency scientists found that the Kyoto Protocal's EU ETS reduced greenhouse gas emissions by between 2 to 5 percent compared to business as usual scenarios, resulting in up to 300 million metric tons of carbon savings.
• The U.S. Renewable Energy Certificate market, along with federal and state tax incentives, has helped increase U.S. wind and solar capacity by 600% since 2002.

However, for environmental markets to work, their participants need to be able to utilize these markets to build value. And that is what 3Degrees enables its partners to do.