OT: Carbon credits

[CW]

Al Gore has stated that he bought carbon credits to offset the energy consumption of his house. Near as I know, there is no requirement (yet) to buy these carbon credits, no issuing agency and, near as I know, no regulation as to what they are or where the money goes. It would appear that, under the circumstances, anybody with a printer and a little design skill could print up a few million of these things and get rich selling them to those that feel that throwing their money away somehow offsets their sins against the environment with the only real result being adding to the wealth of the issuing company. Kind of like a televangelist. "Send me your money and God will love you for it". The only "love" in the business is the televangelist "loving" the fact that people are so gullible as to send him their money.

[keithw86]

It's even better when you buy the carbon credits from yourself. Even a televangelist doesn't benefit from sending himself money.

[Robatoy]

Great idea! Then use all that collected money to buy a 50-foot boat with twin V-12 Lambourghini enigines....

[Swingman]

Too late, dude ... Leon gave me this a couple of years ago in honor of Big Al and his Nobel bauble:

Uriah Heep, I was indeed humbled by the honor ... :)

[Doug Winterburn]

Why pay?

[CW]

I was thinking of expanding my Harley collection.

[CW]

printing money. People will give you lots of stuff for that.

[Leon]

Awwww. You remembered..... wiping something from my eye.... Not a tear. ;~)

[Larry Jaques]

On Fri, 8 Jan 2010 09:51:43 -0800 (PST), the infamous " [e-mail]" scrawled the following:

FugAlGore.

I paid $3 for 247,619,423.6 carbon credits. That's the quantity I figure I've saved since 1970.

has the templates. Mine's framed and on the wall.

-- We rightly care about the environment. But our neurotic obsession with carbon betrays an inability to distinguish between pollution and the stuff of life itself. --Bret Stephens, WSJ 1/5/10

[Mark & Juanita]

It's better than that. He bought the carbon offsets from an eco-company that he happens to own. i.e., he paid himself. Kind of like you putting $20 in the nightstand to pay for spending the night in your own bed.

[CW]

It's beyond me why his supporters dont see him for what he is.

[LDosser]

As long as you don't put it in the wife's nightstand ...

[HeyBub]

It's in the taxes.

I once had an opportunity to buy into a sand pit.

As the sand was sold, I would get a tax credit for depleting a natural resource.

When the sand ran out, We'd end up with a big honkin' hole in the ground. We would then charge people to dump stuff in the hole (concrete, tree stumps, construction debris, that sort of thing).

As the hole filled up, we would get another tax break for depleting another resource (the hole).

When the hole got filled, we'd cover it with topsoil and sell the land for a low-cost housing development. More tax breaks.

It's the American way.

[Revivul]

It's possible that some people would rather we do the right thing for the wrong reasons than not at all.

[J. Clarke]

So what, exactly, is "the right thing"? According to Copenhagen it's paying trillions of dollars of tribute to the world's largest polluter.

[HeyBub]

I don't know if you can get carbon credits (although there should be some way), but for $18 you can plant a tree in Israel via the Jewish National Fund

've seen the JNF's work. The line of demarcation between a JNF planted area and a wasteland is as vivid as the boundary between Fangorn Forest and Orc-land.

Still,

The Jew says to the Arab: "Why are you upset? This used to be a desert, now it's a forest!"

The Arab thinks: "Yeah, but it was MY desert, now it's YOUR forest!"

It's for the squirrels.

[dpb]

Revivul wrote: ...

There's no certainty that making decisions on faulty and/or incomplete data and/or hypotheses is at all "the right thing". Action taken under such could turn out to be precisely the wrong thing at worst or totally ineffectual.

--

[Revivul]

And yet ... we do it all the time.

[Revivul]

Reduce our dependence on fossil fuel ... dramatically.

It's a finite commodity controlled by unstable regimes.

Its pollution causes big respiratory issues and decreased productivity.

The protection OF it leads to wars and death -- physical AND economic.

There are SO MANY valid reasons to pursue this course (reducing our dependence on it) that it's functionally irrelevant whether or not it has any bearing on global climate.

If it does ... it's just gravy.

[dpb]

So you're advocating continuing to do so?

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