The following is what I heard once on ‘right wing talk radio’, I have not had the desire to check it out.
Al Gore’s carbon neutral lifestyle is investing in his own company, basically funding his company, with hopes of a positive return on investment, which goes into Al Gore’s pocket. The company does do something that reduces carbon emissions (perhaps solar/wind energy)
What you are doing with your $28 is basically giving your money to Al Gore’s company (or similar), and into Al Gore’s pocket.
The basic theory here is that by supporting their “Carbon reducing” programs, you eliminate the effect of your energy consumption. The problem is that they don’t support or justify the calculus by which they determine that X of your dollars will result in the consumption of Y tonnes of CO2. The Web site speaks of “projects” and “development,” which of course do not have a known impaqct until they’re completed and proven to result in a predictable amount of carbon taken out of the atmosphere.
Just for the hell of it I plugged in my vehicle use for myself and my wife and it said I owed them $106 to offset it. I’d guess my vehicle use is typical, so I multiplied that by all the households in the state of California - about 11.7 million, at a guess - and figured that for the relatively paltry sum of $1.2 billion, you could eliminate the effect of all the cars in the State of California. Now, do you REALLY believe that? A billion dollars is chump change to the government of the USA; could they actually eliminate the effect of all the cars in California for just a billion bucks? That would be about the same for all the cars in Canada. If the other numbers are true, Canada could eliminate its entire carbon footprint for a mere $2 billion, or less than twenty percent of the federal government’s annual surplus. That’s ludicrous.
It’s a scam. There are things which can be done to improve the air, such as planting more trees, but you can do that yourself with no help from anyone. Fact is, any and everything humans do (and all animals, and all plants, and all bacteria and fungi) produce “negative externalties.” These are bad effects which hit others or everyone, and it includes pollution. And it’s always theres. You can never eliminate it. You can only mitigate and channel it, and Al Gore’s private jetsetting does damage that he can never eliminate no matter how much he funds his little indulgence-selling Church of Gore.
It’s definately a scam. They don’t even list my two favorite hobbies: Pulling trees out of the ground with my SUV and watching styrafoam burn. Nothing like clearing out a patch of old-growth forest and fireing up a 20 foot pyramid of coolers to make a cold November evening much warmer.
I have one question for you since you and your wife’s vehicular cabon imprint is so much higher than mine. Did you convert your “mileage” from kilometers to miles ? Like as if that’s significant to the issue at hand.
Well you can can do it yourself. Or you can pay someone else to do it. One would think that the effect would be the same, and presumably a company that specializes in this sort of thing would be able to do it more efficently. How is it a scam?
But the question in the OP is can he mitigate it by buying offsets?
So he pays a company he owns to perform a service for him. What’s the problem? I bet Bill Gates buys Windows too, thus “lining his own pocket”.
[homers brain]Money can be exchanged for goods and services![/homers brain]
I don’t really know if Carbon Offset companies are a jip, but the arguments here aren’t very convincing.
I suspect that its more then a million times more expensive to offset a million people then it is to offset a single person. For example, according to the site, one of the ways they offset is by buying carbon credits. Buying enough for one person won’t effect the price, but buying millions will probably drive up demand to the point where it would be much more then a million times more expensive.
I imagine similar problems arise with scaling up other schemes to offset carbon emissions.
I suspect there’s a limit to how many people can be offset by their methods - there probably isn’t enough room to plant enough trees to offset everyone in California.
According to the wikipedia article (citing this IPCC report) “The mitigation costs through forestry can be quite modest (US$0.1–US$20 / metric ton carbon dioxide)”. It looks like your car is burning something like 20 tons a year, so the cost calculated by the website wasn’t totally off.
To a certain point, but I imagine that at some point you’re gonna run out of cheap land to buy to put forests on, and at some point it’ll start competing with farming for land. (on preview: what Taber said)
I think most of it is planted in the rainforest, and haven’t we been trying to stop deforestation there? If planting trees becomes more profitable than cutting them down, people will plant them. It will take quite a while before it all gets filled back up again.
“But I make a profit of three and a quarter cents an egg by selling them for four and a quarter cents an egg to the people in Malta I buy them from for seven cents an egg. Of course, I don’t make the profit. The syndicate makes the profit. And everybody has a share.” – Milo Minderbender, Catch-22
You sound like my kind of treehugger. Let’s go dump some toxic waste in a schoolyard sometime.
Here’s the thing - if you’re worried about lack of reuptake of the fossil carbon you’re releasing into the atmosphere, what’s the problem with trying to resequestrate some of that? (And if Mr Gore profits from enterprises that do this very thing, surely that’s a good thing if you’re a free market proponent?)
The reason carbon offsetting programs are crap is that they’re not regulated, they don’t take into account the carbon output from actually doing the offsetting, and a lot of them have turned out to be scams. Furthermore, the actual level of sequestration involved in various offsetting activities is not firmly calculated.
That said, the fact that the companies offering this service tend to be a crock, doesn’t mean the idea in itself is.
I suspect you aren’t thinking of what “suspicious” actually means. (Hint: It does not mean I’m sure they’re a scam.) Or, you don’t know much about wikipedia.
