VitalAccurateThinking

Carbon Neutrality Via Guilt

Consumers Offer Penance For Pollution

I am starting to see this sort of tactic a lot in the media.

The average American generates 23 tons of it every year, says Eric Carlson of Carbonfund.org, a non-profit based in Maryland. It's $99 "zero carbon" package will karmically wipe away those tons for you. For this, you could opt to have trees planted (type and number of trees depends on your choice of location, but the formula is generally three trees per ton).

"Karmically wipe"?!?!

Please stop the guilt trips that sound as if they come from my Catholic grandmother who has long since passed away. I want facts, not hype and guilt. I guess I cannot help but post some more of this article:

Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is a good example of what word-of-mouth can do for an idea.Knowing that a graduation ceremony can generate a fair amount of pollution, the graduating students did some calculations. Between family and friends traveling to and from the graduation, by car or by plane, they estimated the event would produce 325 tons of carbon. Figuring that this was hardly the example that a forestry school should set, they raised among themselves $800 and purchased "renewable energy credits."

These credits ensured that, even as their family and friends fouled the air with conventional fuel, environment-friendly projects were keeping the ecological balance intact somewhere else in the world.

Get that: "friends and family fouled the air". That is rich.

Jeanne Troy, another graduate of the forestry school, and her husband-to-be were expecting 110 guests for their wedding last year.

"Once we had the guest list set, we figured out who was flying and who was driving cars," she says - and then they set the stage for their carbon-neutral nuptials.

They contacted NativeEnergy, an energy company privately held by Native Americans in Vermont.

Hmmmmmmmm.....NativeEnergy, now why does that sound familiar. Al Gore and Inconvenient Truth perhaps? (more on this much later).

Listen, I am not panning carbon neutrality. I just want to separate the science from the hype, the carbon-neutrality culture phenomenon from the business of offsets.

posted by Jim VAT @ 8:12 AM