Jeff commented on a previous post ... "My favorite quote is..""Carbon offsetting? I wouldn't dream of it. It's just a joke. To pay money to plant trees, to think you're offsetting the carbon? You're probably making matters worse. You're far better off giving to the charity Cool Earth, which gives the money to the native peoples to not take down their forests.".. I must say I agree.. Carbon offsets just make people feel better and someone else takes makes money.. We need to stop burning stuff.. we're not very good at that.. I don't want to conceded that we lost all hope though either.. I just think we're wasting alot of time with "feel-good" easy fixes that make corporations money. When we need serious people to sit down and plan out serious solutions.. Those serious solutions need to be implemented..."
These are quotes from the interview with Dr Lovelock ... and I guess I kind of agree - we've got to think very carefully about how this carbon offsetting thing works... it's hard enough to measure the amount of C taken up by an intensively measured forest - I'm afraid I don't believe that Carbon Offset companies have any clue how much CO2 is being taken up by any of their projects and what's more ... there is nothing to stop them from inflating their claims or even lying outright about the amount of C offset. I've always thought of them as ecological indulgences .... I'm not an economist but carbon offset ventures strikes me as a way to exploit people who care about the environment but don't think too critically about it. So why does Al Gore do it?
No comments:
Post a Comment