Should you reduce your carbon footprint or just buy carbon offsets? Carbon offsetting is popular and is a lucrative business. I've seen credit cards that make donations to offset your carbon usage, I've seen travel companies that allow you to purchase carbon offsets for your travels, but mostly I've seen large corporations purchase carbon offsets. The dilemma is that carbon offsets allow the offenders to pay for the right to continue offending while those who reduce their carbon footprint create more and more room for the offenders. There are, however, circumstances where cleaner alternatives do not exist and carbon offsetting allows these companies to attempt to mitigate their environmental damage. To parody the absurdity of carbon offsets, the humorous CheatNeutral website was created. Check it out: http://www.cheatneutral.com/
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I've been concerned about this as well ("I'm paying for it so I can have it"). I'm curious however(and hold some faith) about the fact that assigning a real dollar cost to carbon contribution might be one of the few, if only ways, to place carbon generation on the balance sheet and to identify it as an addressable, financial issue.
Hey if cheatneutral really wants too do this it should get serious!
Firstly there is already an established market for cheating – prostitution. If cheatneutral priced there cheating offset at current market prices this would greatly increase the cost of cheating. At the current price of £2.50, which wouldn’t get you a good cup of tea let alone a root, cheatneutral provides no disincentive to cheat. What would the impact be if a cheat offset were £100?
Secondly, cheatneutral need to get up to speed with their offset projects. The current projects don’t measure up. Their projects pay people who are currently not cheating to continue to not cheat. Instead they should be paying prostitutes, at market rates, to not have sex with people in relationships. This would reduce the net amount of pain and unhappy emotion emitted to the atmosphere.
So come on guys get serious about using market instruments to reduce cheating.
Post a Comment