Carbon offsets

Getting back into the blogging game after 10 days of vacation. Loaded up the minivan with wife, three kids and a buncha crap, traveled from Gettysburg to Maine via Montague, Mass (total travel time: 12 hours); thence to the shores of Lake Michigan in northern MI via Sarnia, Ontario (26 hours, most of it through pouring rain and construction); thence back to Gettysburg (15 hours). Total mileage: 2400. Cost of gas: approximately $380. Toll on psyche: inestimable. But - in Maine I caught a bass so bit it broke my rod. And when I tumbled out of my car at the campsite in Michigan, my friend Steve was there with a cold beer at the ready. So it was all worth it.

I'm feeling somewhat guilty, however, at the greenhouse gases I spewed on my odyssey. If I truly loved my earth I would've spent the extra bucks and flown or trained for part of the journey. If only there existed a mechanism by which society could make it easier for me to make that kind of choice. Which brings up this article in the New York Times. Apparently, GE is joining the ranks of companies that are making bucks off the guilt of consumers like me. In principle, I could calculate the excess carbon emissions my trip is responsible for producing and buy an equivalent amount of carbon offsets from a company like Carbonfund, TerraPass, or NativeEnergy. Perhaps the cost of the offsets would be so great that I would choose to use a less carbon-based transportation alternative.

The knock on the carbon offsetting bizz is that it's merely a way of assuaging the guilt of affluent consumers. One hopes that the offsets one is buying are really reducing carbon emissions somewhere in the world, but it's hard to verify this. What's missing, it seems to me, is some entrepreneurial activity on the other end of the market. Suppose there was a company that would come to my home and do a thorough carbon inventory of my entire lifestyle, then present me with concrete measures I could take to reduce my carbon emissions, then pay me for taking these measures using money paid in by the guilt-ridden consumers who are buying offsets now? Now you've got consumers not just assuaging guilt, but taking concrete steps to change behavior. And it would focus everyone's attention on the simple emissions-savings technologies that supposedly are all around us like low-hanging fruit.