jiggygirl is apparently ahead of the trend here. She makes me pay a dollar every time she catches me. She's thinking more of the local environment than the global one though.
Posted on 12/10/2006 4:50:18 PM PST by BenLurkin
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Jill Cody used to feel guilty whenever she drove her car or flew on an airplane. She worried about pumping heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.
But the San Jose professor found a way to ease her conscience. She paid a San Francisco company called TerraPass to offset emissions from her car and air travel by investing in wind power and reducing farm pollution.
"I'm part of the solution, not the problem," said Cody, who sports a TerraPass decal on the decade-old Lexus she drives about 6,000 miles a year. "Now I don't feel guilty when I drive my car."
As anxiety over global climate change rises, a growing number of companies and nonprofit groups are offering eco-conscious consumers a chance to compensate the planet for the carbon emissions they generate when they drive, fly, use electricity or heat their homes.
So-called "carbon offsets" are becoming increasingly popular, but critics say they are just a way to assuage consumer guilt and do little to combat climate change. At worst, they can encourage consumption and prevent people from making carbon-cutting lifestyle changes, such as driving less, taking public transit and using less electricity.
"We're still in a buyer-beware situation where people have to be careful and ask some questions," said Mark Trexler, president of Portland-based Trexler Climate and Energy Services. "The key question is -- is your money helping to make something happen that wouldn't otherwise happen?"
Firms that sell such offsets help consumers calculate how much carbon their activities generate, then pledge to counterbalance the environmental impact by restoring forests, forcing businesses to curb emissions and funding renewable energy such as wind and solar.
For example, the Conservation Fund, an Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit that restores wilderness on unproductive farmland, lets consumers offset their emissions by paying to plant trees. The group has a partnership with online travel company Travelocity that gives travelers the option of making a donation to the fund when they buy plane tickets.
It costs about $4 to offset a ton of carbon, and about $80 to offset the 20 tons of carbon the average American generates in one year, said the fund's Chris Fanning. Each tree absorbs more than a ton of carbon over a 100-year life cycle.
"It allows people to take personal responsibility and action in their own lives," Fanning said.
Backers say carbon offsets can help make people more conscious of climate change -- and show policymakers that Americans want the government to take action to stop global warming. Experts say the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases is leading to extreme weather, melting snowcaps, species extinction and rising seas.
San Francisco-based TerraPass is another of more than 30 companies and nonprofit groups that promise to ease global warming guilt by selling carbon offsets.
The firm tells drivers that for $49.99 they can make up for the 12,000 tons of carbon a typical sedan or station wagon produces in a year. Ford Motor Co. encourages buyers to offset emissions from their cars through TerraPass.
TerraPass has a complex formula for calculating how much it costs to offset a certain amount of carbon, and the company keeps a portion as profit. It charges customers of Expedia.com $5.99 to neutralize the carbon generated from one seat on a 2,200-mile flight, $16.99 for a cross-country flight and a $29.99 for an international flight.
The money is used to fund projects that generate clean electricity from wind, landfills and cow manure, and the offsets are verified by the Center for Resource Solutions, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that works to increase the demand for renewable energy, said Tom Arnold, TerraPass's chief environmental officer.
Arnold claims his company has counteracted the effects of 165 million pounds of carbon since it was founded by University of Pennsylvania Professor Karl Ulrich and his students two years ago.
"It helps you think differently about climate change and what you can do to fight it," Arnold said.
Yet some observers note that increasing renewable energy doesn't necessarily reduce the use of conventional electricity sources that emit carbon. And while trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere, the process is spread out over the decades of a tree's lifetime.
People concerned about global warming should first do everything they can to reduce their personal emissions -- and only buy offsets for activities for which there are few green alternatives such as flying, environmentalists say.
"It's not a license to pollute," said Craig Noble, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which offsets emissions from its employees' travel. "The idea is not to buy a Hummer and then at the end of the year buy offsets for your driving."
Carbon offsets are not new. Utilities, power providers and other corporations have been buying them since the 1990s to comply with state laws requiring them to compensate for their emissions or prepare for future federal regulations.
In recent years, corporations have bought them to burnish their green credentials. The North Face, an outdoors supplier, and grocery chain Whole Foods have offset emissions from their stores and office buildings. Organizers of the Super Bowl, Winter Olympics and Dave Matthews Band tour have promised to make their events carbon-neutral.
Now the trend has caught on with environmentally minded consumers like Larry Coury, a New York patent attorney who doesn't own a car, rides the subway to work and pays extra so his home electricity only comes from renewable energy sources.
Coury's job requires frequent travel, but there are no carbon-free alternatives to flying. So he paid extra to offset the emissions for a recent flight to West Virginia that he booked through Travelocity.
"It makes me feel a little bit better," Coury said, "to take whatever steps I can to address global warming."
LOL, good snag. Two pounds in the "credit" column I guess, huh...
In all seriousness, many common aspects of left-leaning (*cough*) behavior, e.g., militant vegetaranism, are indistinguishable and in some cases are in fact symptoms of underlying obsessive-compulsive disorder. This "carbon anxiety", if I may coin a phrase, might similarly be masking an anxiety disorder.
Since human intestinal gas contains ozone depleting methane, the good lady should also pay guilt money for her farts.
Consider, a car isn't just a car. It's the sum total of the steps of production.
For example the steel that go into the car and the energy cost to make that steel. Heavy mining operations to dig the ore, smelt it, burning tons of coal, the shipping by truck, rail, barge, and ship and the energy used for that, etc. Even the co2 exhaled by the workers at each stage of the process. THEN the actual fuel consumption for driving.
The list goes on and on, limited only by your creativity. You may very well be able to arrive at 12,000 tons amortized per year on a car.
Somebody should check their facts.
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Indeed. Just a few lines earlier we were told about "the 20 tons of carbon the average American generates in one year".
Just for laffs, are either of those numbers plausible? Let's say you drive 24,000 miles a year and get 24 MPG, that's 1000 gallons of gas. Anybody know how much a gallon of gas weighs? It's less than water which is 8.3 lbs/gallon, so that's less than 8300 lbs and certainly only a fraction of that because gasoline is not pure carbon.
jiggygirl is apparently ahead of the trend here. She makes me pay a dollar every time she catches me. She's thinking more of the local environment than the global one though.
I sell the stuff for $2 a ton.
I'll accept their "ain payments" and buy gas for my truck, my gas bill is currently $350-400/mo.!
Here's how this works:
one pound of gasoline expressed as octane gives us C8+H18 or 114 moles
add 14 pounds of air and 16CO2, 9H2O comes out the tailpipe or 704 moles
114/704=6.176
one gallon gas=20 miles
15,000 miles/year=750 gallons
one gallon gas=6.5 pounds
6.5X6.176=40.114 pounds CO2/gallon
40.114X750=30108 pounds or 15.054 tons
I have an idea, Jill! Hold your breath. Forever. That way you will no longer spew CO2 or any other noxious fumes that emit from your feeble piehole. Encourage your friends in "the Movement" to do the same. Please.
How long until this becomes mandatory?
Twaddle indeed. If liberalism is their religion, then this is their way of doing penance. Pathetic. Makes me want to get a BIG SUV.
'restores wilderness on unproductive farmland'??? -- Wouldn't that mean letting the weeds grow where it was once cultivated? And they get paid to do that? hhahaha.
Love your WHOLE POST! *carbon anxiety* -- Superb!!!
And when the trees die, they release that carbon back to the environment anyway.
And if you drove continuously without ever stopping, you'd have to drive at an average speed of (24 million miles per year) / (8,765 hours per year) = 2,738 miles per hour.
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