NationStates Jolt Archive

Oh dear, I'm feeling so guilty about driving my private jet from Chicago to Springfield, then driving a block in a 12 car motorcade. How can I make up for it?
Don't worry friend, there's a way: By having third worlders make their children work hand machines instead of using an engine to pump water and work the fields. You'll offset your carbon output and be able to continue your decadent lifestyle!

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3788/

geeez zat, its my JET. i dont want to have to do without it and i dont want to catch a ration of shit from the eco guys. what else can i do??

thats carbon offsets in a nutshell alright. the rich do as they please and pretend that paying others to not pollute makes up for it.

Yeah most of the celebrities and "named" people promoting Global Warming awareness have larger pollution footprints than most states do so there's a grain of salt that should be taken every time they open their mouths that and good lord scare tactics anyone?

Buying indulgences is making a comeback.

So....what would the solution be then? Or is there simply none?

That's kinda...what's the word I'm looking for? Uh...lame. That's it.

There is a solution. It's called fission. The Swiss use a combination of fission power plants and hydroelectric dams to generate over 99% of their power, effectively making them carbon-neutral, but not negative which is what you'd really need if you really think that a 100 ppmv increase in carbon dioxide will destroy the world. As you may have geussed, I don't buy into the hyped up doom and gloom catastrophy scenarios but I'm not opposed to cleaner sources of power so long as they can deliver what they promise.

Now not everyone can afford fission power and those that can might not want to bother because let's face it, coal is cheaper. But wood is equally cheap, is renewable (plants have a nasty habit of growing back, even when you don't want them to), and can be burned in much the same way that coal is for power and water purification. Trees also happen to be what the rich snob celebrities and their armies of mindless hippy drones are telling everyone they're completely disconnected from to plant in order to save a planet that is no real danger to begin with. Unlike the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal/Great Depression days where never more than 1/3 of the unemployed in America were rounded up and sent off to labor camps in the middle of Nowhere, MT to work for $1 a day (only to have all but $5 taken from them and sent back home...or to the pocket of some government fatcat, it's sometimes hard to tell) planting trees and building cabins and roads that are hardly used today, a push to use trees for fuel now in place of coal would require lots of seeds to be planted. The difference between then and now is that the trees, a renewable resource, would actually be used for something.

Plant enough excess and you might even be able to do away with the wasteful process of paper recycling. That's right, paper recycling is a smokey, scummy process that actually harms the environment. See the paper you put on the curb has to get picked up by a big truck and driven to a sorting/holding facility where it gets picked up by a conga line of big trucks and driven to the actual reprocessing plant, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Once there it gets shredded and soaked and turned into pulp which then has to get bleached and treated with other chemicals that, after doing their job, end up as a scummy, toxic slime that has no use except maybe as low quality rat poison. The quality of the paper is reduced because the fibers are damaged by this whole process. Did I mention the entire ordeal is expensive and dirty? In fact the only reason that anyone can make any money doing it is because the government subsidizes it heavily with your tax dollars, right along with glass recycling and a whole lot of other wasteful projects both left and right. It'd make more sense and probably be a hella lot better for the environment if congress just told every logging and paper company to plant and water 3 or 4 seeds for every tree they cut down.

Carbon offsets are a joke, plain and simple. You're always going to be better off spending the money maximizing the energy efficiency of your vehicles, residence, and appliances than you are wasting it on offsets which more often than not do nothing more than assuage your conscience.

By improving your efficiency, not only do you significantly reduce CO2 emissions with few or no lifestyle changes, but you also save money as the cost of running them drops and are insured against further price increases, perhaps even rewarded as widespread efficiency gains decrease demand and prices. Hell, you don't even need to conserve if you increase efficiency; once you upgrade your efficien energycy, you reap the benefits of that investment from that point forward with no additional work beyond that required for any appliance, vehicle or structure.

And, to make things even better, efficiency improvements allow room for others to develop economically, giving them the tools they need to cut their own energy and resource intensity! It's the gift that keeps on giving. Here's a simple truth: you can't make people give up the things they have and want. It's just not going to happen. However, you can address the situation by making what they want better and more efficient; there's a lot of room for offsetting and reducing the damage done by our economy to the environment, and that's the direction we need to pursue.

Well at least MTV is making the Real World 20 house green..