I agree with the author.
Like medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness—about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.
But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too—because they’re not going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that...
Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.
We don’t control the global supply of carbon.
It gets even better from there--he supports nuclear energy.
We have to have nuclear.
ReplyDeleteBut we also have to look at better ways to use the available fuels we have here and now. We need to find a way to use coal-abundant and cheap. We need to realize that all the solar and wind generators are nothing more than a stopgap for energy consumption and that the efficiency is not up to producing an iota of what we need. We also need to realize how many companies are using "green" as an excuse to sell us cheap, manufactured goods that will fail and have to be replaced more frequently such as the cardboard speakers featured here:
http://www.thisnext.com/item/9059D34B/MUJI-Cardboard-Speakers
Wouldn't it make more sense to have high quality, durable speakers that would last for YEARS rather than cheap cardboard components that will need to be replaced every time the humidity gets too high? And that is just the tip of the iceberg. In today's papers, there were countless stupid products that owed their whole existence to the idea of "green" when all they really were were cheap schlock.
Ellen K - That is because the "green" movement isn't real. It's all just hype. A lot of people are on the "green" kick just because it is cool. Very few people truly believe in it enough to really think about how "green" their actions are before they make them. Everyone else is just following along like sheep. As soon as Hollywood moves onto the next fad, all this fake "green" crap will fade away.
ReplyDeleteI celebrated earth day like I normally do....I burned a tire.
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