Please explain (someone!) what "carbon offsets" are. We hear about them all the time lately, but is this something real or just a scam?
It's a scam.
But it does help rich liberals to feel good.
So in a capitalist sense, they are providing a needed service.
Environmental prozac, as it were.
You buy carbon offsets so that you do not have to reduce your carbon output. A carbon offset can be having a company plant trees for a price and in return you get carbon offsets. Another example are windfarms. They sell carbon credits -- because they produce no CO2 -- and you can buy them so that you do not have to reduce your carbon output.
It's a big scam and Gore buys them so that he doesn't have to do a damn thing. Us regular people don't have the money for this nonsense scam.
Here's more info: What is a carbon offset?
Carbon offsets are like the payments the elites made in the Civil War to buy someone else off to serve in the Union Army for them.
If you can pay some poor slob to use an outhouse instead of his heated and lighted and plumbed indoor one, you get credits so that you can have 8 bathrooms in your own mansion and not feel guilty.
Algore probably pays somebody to use corncobs so that he and Tipper can use extra soft perfumed toilet paper.
1) Calculate how much carbon you emit through the goods and services you consume, plane trips, etc.
2) Purchase credits proportional to how much carbon you emit.
3) The company from which you purchased the credits will go plant a tree or invest in an alternative energy plant or similar to offset your emissions.
I have no problems planting my own trees or buying stock in companies as I see fit. But I expect to see a return for it - in my yard or in my portfolio. With carbon offsets you get nothing back but a warm fuzzy.
I'm sorry you don't listen to Rush Limbaugh. Yesterday he explained this whole thing on the subject.
http://www.terrapass.com/
This is a carbon offset site.
The ComPost didn't want to explain what those "Carbon Offsets" were. It sounds good until you learn the details.
What it means, according to a somewhat more detailed article published here yesterday (which hadn't yet edited out the inconvenient details) is that Gore has bought a lot of forest land, and the photosynthesis from his own personal trees makes up for the huge heating and air conditioning bills.
So, in order to "offset" their carbon use it means that everybody should go out and buy a few square miles of forest. Simple. If you have the millions in spare change like Gore does.
The leftist media also doesn't explain that gore inherited a huge bundle of stock in Occidental Petroleum, from his daddy, who worked for Armand Hammer and Uncle Joe Stalin. So he has plenty of money to buy land with. No problem.
They are Gore's version of Kerry's nuances. That means FReepers just cannot understand them at all, no matter how hard our addled brains try.
(I say this only because I see you've already gotten the technically correct answer. LOL.)
Basically, if you got the bank...you make a donation [commensurate to the amount of energy you used] to an alternative energy company [leaf gas, windmill farm, boisonberry lighter fluid etc, etc.]...thats all...and presto chango, you magically did not polute the planet in the first place.
Just a scam to fund private alternative energy companies.
Now, imagine talk radio offsets.