The stock market is down, the credit market is frozen, the real estate market is tanking … the end is near! Despite all these bad economic signs, one market, according to The Washington Post, is actually doing quite well: the carbon offset market.
Never mind that just about every neutral study done on on the carbon offset market has revealed it to be an absolute fraud. The wealthy secular left demand to keep both their jet setting lifestyles and the belief that unchecked carbon emissions are about to destroy the planet. The result: guilt. The Washington Post reports:
“I was feeling really guilty because I was basically traveling to three continents in the last month: ‘I’ve spent basically six days on an airplane. I’ve got to fix this,’ ” said Michael Sheets, 27, who lives in the District’s Logan Circle neighborhood.
So a few days ago, Sheets paid $240 to a Silver Spring-based vendor, Carbonfund.org, choosing its offsets because they were more than $100 cheaper than a comparable package from another offset seller. He got back an e-mail saying that the 52,920 pounds of greenhouse-gas emissions attributable to him for the entire year, including his trips to Trinidad, Thailand and Argentina, had been canceled out.
“I feel much better about it,” said Sheets, human resources director for an online-education company in Northern Virginia. “I don’t feel as guilty about flying to Vegas tomorrow for the weekend.”
See the progress we’ve made in the past 500 years? In Martin Luther’s time, believers paid the church for sins that would be committed in Vegas. Now the gaia worshiping left pays for the sin of getting to Vegas.
One never has to dig far to uncover the complete fraud behind these offset programs. The Post reports:
In the western Virginia town of Christiansburg, the operators of a landfill sell carbon offsets tied to a project that captures methane, a powerful greenhouse pollutant, and burn it in a tall orange flare. They’ve made $43,000 on the Chicago Climate Exchange in just a couple of months.
But that project was put in long before the offsets were sold and for a different reason: to keep dangerous gases from accumulating in a capped landfill. So if the offset market dried up completely?
Nothing would change.
The money “is gravy to us right now,” said Alan Cummins, executive director of the regional authority that runs the landfill. Even without it, he said, “we would always continue to flare.”
I don't believe that carbon offsets are fake — but then again I work for Carbonfund.org… I have seen our projects and I have met the people that verify them. I know they are real, and I know that they work.
Everyone wants to be responsible stewards of the earth to help protect god's creation, that is why groups like the Interfaith Power and Light were created. Global warming is according to a vast majority of scientists to be real and poses a real threat to the earth, shouldn't we be doing something about this? Not many people are going to stop driving to church or flying to see their family for Christmas, and we don't think that that they should because those aren't indulgences — but they do contribute to global warming. So why not offset?
Paul, I am not sure who you mean by "everyone" but you cannot possibly be including me or many other Americans I know because, as atheists, we have no desire to protect "God's creation." Perhaps you forgot, but we have freedom of religion in this country, including freedom FROM religion. In addition to that, I do not believe that man can affect global warming. If the earth is going into a warming cycle, it's being caused by forces of nature. And finally, I use what I need of this planet to live my life comfortably and to thrive (not just survive or get by.) Exploit the Earth, or Die! http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/exploit-the-e…
Come on Paul, carbon offsets are just another way for the over-indulgent to ease their guilt. If they want to make a difference stop driving big gas guzzlers, stop flying and ride a bicycle. Paying an offset does not keep them from puking junk into the atmosphere. They just pay to do it and not feel guilty. As far as a "vast majority of scientists" believing that man is causing global warming, who are these scientists? What qualifies them to make such a decision? I have a degree! I read books! I even teach science! Does that make me a scientist qualified to make such a bold statement?
Pingback: Building Bridges: A Bull Market in Green Guilt isn’t Sustainable : Sustainablog
If the carbon offsets are free, can it be a fraud?
http://www.freecarbonoffsets.com