Voluntary Carbon Offsets

Does it really help?

Alice Kenny: Environmentalists Clash Over Carbon Offsets

Carbonfund.org

A critique from The Nation

It should be the responsibilty of corporations to reduce pollution, not something they should be paid to do. Furthermore, a few small changes in individual lifestyle might be more effective than shelling out cash. Ah, but here we are back to the half-empty, half-full dilemma. I don’t know!!! I guess if a company is using my money to plant trees or build windmills it might be making a difference, but I find it hard to believe my checkbook can solve global warming. It’s like having bypass surgery instead of changing my diet to prevent a heart attack.

CarbonFree (TM)

Ecofuture, producers of a CFL light bulb dubbed “THE bulb” (www.thebulb.com), have labeled their product with a CarbonFree logo, right along side the Energy Star logo. The company claims to offset “all” CO2 emissions of their light bulbs by donating to carbonfund.org. Both “THE bulb” and “CarbonFree?” are trademarks of Carbonfund.org. Link

No company has gone to such great lengths to project a green image as energy giant BP. In 2000, a year after BP ventured into renewable energy by scooping up Solarex for $45 million, it paid more than four times as much on rebranding, dropping its full name of British Petroleum to become simply BP while adopting the environmentally friendly slogan “Beyond Petroleum” and putting up billboards to promote itself as an alternative-energy company. But has the company really moved beyond petroleum? The BP website tells it straight: “Our main activities are the exploration and production of crude oil and natural gas; refining, marketing, supply and transportation; and the manufacture and marketing of petrochemicals.”

Now it’s been reported that BP is planning to conduct hugely counterproductive extraction of oil in Canada, what is being described by environmentalists as the biggest environmental crime in history