With a click, a credit card and $99, visitors can pay a Silver Spring nonprofit group, Carbonfund.org, to 'offset' a year's worth of greenhouse-gas emissions. Whatever the customer put into the atmosphere — by flying, driving, using electricity — the site promises to cancel out, by funding projects that reduce pollutants. Sites such as this one, offering absolution from the modern nag of climate guilt, have created a $55 million industry that once would have been beyond the greenest of imaginations. The market for 'voluntary carbon offsets' now encompasses dozens of sellers and thousands of buyers, including individuals and corporations. But in some cases, these customers may be buying good feelings and little else. A closer look reveals an unregulated market in which some improvements bought by customers are only estimated, extrapolated, hoped-for or nil. Some offsets support projects that would have gone forward anyway. Others deliver results difficult to measure. (Washington Post, Thursday)
How government grows: First scare the public, then regulate its response.
FEE Timely Classic
The Green Scare by Roger E. Meiners