Back in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church would sell you an “indulgence” for your sins. Pay the church a set amount per sin, and they’d hand over a piece of fancy paper saying your sin had been wiped clean. It was a quick way for the rich and middle classes to buy their ways into heaven.
These days, green chic has brought us the carbon offset as a modern-day form of the indulgence. Fly on a plane, and for a few extra dollars the airline will throw some money at a random “clean development” project. You pollute the earth with your jet ride, but you feel so much better inside. This is also the worst possible way to support green development. Read more of my rant about the dark side of carbon indulgences.
Annalee, have you seen Alexander Cockburn’s article on this subject? Cockburn is a global warming sceptic, and has mentioned that CO2 is a trailing indicator of global warming (that is, as the planet gets warmer, the ocean releases more CO2). Ice core data shows the same; reading the graph from right(oldest) to left (newest), CO2 increases lag temperature increases. So Al Gore and his friends are asking us to treat a symptom, not a cause, of global warming.
Speaking of Al Gore, when he accepted the Peace Prize for his global warming advocacy, he mentioned “There is not much time”. Perhaps he was thinking about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which caused global cooling from 1946 to 1976, global warming from 1977 to 2007, and may be about to start global cooling again (this process has been traced back about 350 years). I am old enough to remember that in the 1970s people were concerned about a coming Ice Age (and I think the Ice Age is on its way, but it will take a few thousand years before it gets REALLY cold).