James Halloway, reporting for Ars Technica on a new “carbon neutral” office building in San Diego that uses fuel cells for electricity:
Hines intends to buy directed biogas from sources such as water treatment facilities, landfills, and livestock farms—greenhouse gases that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. Yet the issue is muddied by the fact that the US does not yet have a distribution network dedicated to a biogas. The building will actually run on normal gas, but it will offset what it uses with biogas, introduced into the same networks that feed it where possible.
I’m going to go ahead and call this a loophole. Offsets like this are tricky to monitor and susceptible to liberal interpretations.