Maggie's Farm

The “carbon credits” scam actually increases pollution.  

Simple example: let’s say companies are required to reduce their emissions to X parts per million (ppm). Now let’s say that Company A, or an underdeveloped agricultural nation without flatulent cows, already operates entirely on hydroelectric power and produces zero ppm.  Similar-sized Company B operates on coal and produces an excessive 1.5X ppm.  With carbon trading, dirty Company B pays A (who already doesn’t pollute) and gets the right to increase its pollution to 2X ppm through burning cheaper and dirtier coal, for example.  If B couldn’t buy carbon credits it would have to reduce its emissions to 1X ppm (and B taken with A would average 0.5X ppm). 

Carbon trading allows people to continue to pollute and the atmosphere to continue to degrade.  Non-polluters make money, but my lungs see no change. 

Then they made it even dumber – funds that buy shares in green companies (like enterprises which plant trees) can sell carbon credits to polluters and allow them to keep polluting!

Finally, if that’s not bad enough, now we have Al Gore buying his carbon credits from his own investment fund, Generation Investment Management LLP of which he is chairman and a founding partner.  Generation is a boutique international investment firm that invests other peoples’ money, for a fee, into the stocks of ‘green’ companies.  Al uses these credits to compensate for flying himself and his wife around in private jets, driving his SUVs and compensating for his famous $1,200/month electric bills.  See http://www.ecotality.com/blog/?p=350 and http://neveryetmelted.com/?p=2237.

What is clear is that Al himself doesn’t believe his own propaganda.  Ecotality said it this way:

Hypocrisy, after all, abounds. Even Gore’s huge electric power usage at his Nashville home isn’t the only example of how the prophet of environmental doom hasn’t always lived as if he believes his message. During the eight years Gore was vice president, he voted in four national elections. Every single time, he and his entourage and security detail and accompanying media flew to Nashville on a large government jet, burning thousands of gallons of fossil fuels and pumping huge amounts of carbon emissions directly into the earth’s atmosphere, and then rode in a caravan of fossil fuel-burning vehicles from Nashville International Airport about 40 miles east on I-40 to Carthage, Tennessee, so the local and national TV cameras could get video of him at the voting booth. And then the whole caravan headed back to Nashville for the plane ride back to DC. Traffic had to be halted on Nashville’s interstates and side streets every time - sometimes during rush hour - idling thousand of vehicles that just sat there, burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon pollution, just so Gore could create a media photo-op.

He could have instead voted by mailing in an absentee ballot - that would have been the “green” thing to do - and a skillful press aide could easily have turned that into a widely publicized pro-green photo-op.

Image: Gwynnie's favorite location for, and method of, carbon pollution.