Offsetting Your Guilt

One byproduct of the global warming mania is what I like to call the "Green Rush." It's kind of like the gold rush, except this time, everyone is trying to spend a fortune instead of making a new one.

The most obvious example of the Green Rush is the whole "carbon offset" phenomenon. This is usually where people who don't want to personally sacrifice instead decide to just give money to a company that does something - whether it's planting a tree or saving a polar bear - to offset their CO2 emissions.

While that sounds like a great idea in theory, the Real Story is that while these offsets may make people feel good; they often don't do much good. For example, it's become stylish these days to say that you've "gone green," so last year the Academy Awards decided to give each presenter and performer a statue that represented an offset of 100,000 pounds of carbon, which they said was the amount of emissions for a typical Hollywood celebrity in one year.

Sounds great -- except that when you follow the money, you see that it went from the Academy, to a third party company called TerraPass, to a variety of projects, one of the largest being a garbage dump in Arkansas. But here's the problem: that dump instituted a program to cut their methane emissions years ago -- way before TerraPass ever started giving them any cash. So the extra money isn't "offsetting" anything, it's just lining the pockets of the dump's owner, which happens to be Waste Management, a $3 billion dollar company.

In fact, when Business Week did a story about this last year, they called the developers of six projects who had received money from TerraPass. Five of them said that they were doing the projects anyway; that the offset money was just, quote, "icing on the cake."

I've said this before but I want to say it again: I care deeply about our environment. I believe we all have an obligation to leave this Earth no worse than we found it. But I also believe that the hysteria over climate change has created a situation in which well intentioned people are being easily separated from their money. After all, for companies that aren't so well-intentioned, the "green rush" isn't really about pollution; it's about profits.

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