Politics-As-Usual While Planet Burns: American Clean Energy and Security Act Can’t Solve Climate Crisis
By Brian Tokar
From the July 24, 2009 issue
of the Indypendent
"Carbon offsets have become the postmodern version of the indulgences the Catholic church used to sell in the Middle Ages to buy your way out of sin. But on a global scale, with corporations instead of individuals as the main players, they have become a scam of gigantic proportions."
"Rather than promoting innovative measures to reduce energy use in poor countries, as they are usually advertised, carbon offsets are subsidizing the already routine destruction of byproducts from China’s rising production of ozone-destroying hydrofluorocarbons, minor retooling of highly polluting pig iron smelters in India, and methane capture from a notoriously toxic landfill in South Africa."
Read rest of article
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Carbon Confessions from Earth Day 2009, Santa Barbara, CA
The Tree of Carbon Forgiveness

Carbon Penance Generator
|
Penance -- Then and Now

In the Middle Ages, there was no buying and selling of carbon indulgences. Now it's a booming business. "The worst of the carbon-offset programs resemble the Catholic Church's sale of indulgences back before the Reformation," said Denis Hayes, the president of the Bullitt Foundation, an environmental grant-making group. "Instead of reducing their carbon footprints, people take private jets and stretch limos, and then think they can buy an indulgence to forgive their sins." The New York Times, 4/29/07
Carbon-Neutral Is Hip, but Is It Green?

What's a Carbon Footprint?

A
carbon footprint is a "measure of the impact human
activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of
green house gases produced, measured in units of
carbon dioxide". It is meant to be useful for
individuals and organizations to conceptualize their
personal (or organizational) impact in contributing to
global warming. A conceptual tool in response to carbon
footprints are
carbon offsets, or the mitigation of carbon emissions
through the development of alternative projects such as
solar or wind energy or reforestation. A carbon footprint
can be seen as a subset of earlier uses of the concept of
ecological footprints.
Source: Wikipedia - Carbon Footprint
No comments:
Post a Comment