Thursday, December 07, 2006

":Carbon Neutral" - It's a Start

From The Christian Science Monitor

The CSM reports that a growing number of Americans and US businesses are going "carbon neutral." Put simply this is a two-step measure. First you reduce your carbon dioxide emissions as much as possible. Then you contribute an appropriate sum to projects that replace fossil fuels with renewables, a form of "carbon offset."

"But some environmentalists worry that the idea of going "carbon neutral" could be detrimental if it leads to people only buying offsets and not changing their lifestyles.

"'The concept of carbon neutrality is great. But it's one thing for people to do things to reduce their carbon emissions in their own lives; it's another thing for people to buy credits or offsets counting on someone else to clean up their act,' says Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club's global warming project. 'It would be bad if it has the impact of creating sort of 'papal indulgences' that people feel that they're allowed to buy a gas-guzzling SUV or otherwise pollute in ways that they could avoid because they can pay someone else to plant some trees in Guatemala.'

"It's a dangerous way to 'let people off the hook,' agrees Mary Rosenblum, an author who writes science-based novels set in the near future. In her forthcoming book, "Water Rights," the US is faced with desertification from a vastly changed climate. 'It's what our future will probably look like if we don't do anything about it,' says Ms. Rosenblum, who lives near Portland, Ore.

"'If you can drive three SUVs and charge up a couple of hundred bucks [of carbon offsets] on your Visa and then think, 'OK, I've done my share,' we're not going to change anything,' she says.

But some argue that even though the offset programs may be of dubious value, little more than paying lip service to cutting carbon, they still serve a valuable function in educating the public.

It's true that Americans can pay for their "carbon sins" with a relatively small amount of money, says Michele Bowman, a futurist and managing director of Global Foresight Associates in Waltham, Mass. But more important, they'll start to realize exactly what goes into creating carbon emissions and how they're offset, she says. 'And that in turn is going to start to change behavior.'"

This spreading awareness in the US is good news. Too many of us think our governments should sort this out, somehow legislate us out of it. There's much that governments can do but they can't succeed without the same committment from the citizenry. That, in turn, isn't going to be possible until people can come to recognize their individual role in the problem.

It's human nature to live in hope.

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