Earth Day April 22, 2011

info on paying for carbon offsets that is tax deductible and stays here in CO. We pay to offset all of our vehicles' gas usage and our home energy usage every year - their website has the calculator if you know how many miles you drove and how many kilowatt hours you paid for (it's listed in our Xcel bill, I would guess that it's on the IREA bills as well).

Al Gore defends his extraordinary personal energy usage by telling critics he maintains a "carbon neutral" lifestyle by buying "carbon offsets," but the company that receives his payments turns out to be partly owned and chaired by the former vice president himself.

Read more: Gore's 'carbon offsets' paid to firm he owns http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=40445#ixzz1KTUDBSUb

There is something new to feel guilty about: carbon.

This new form of remorse is found among people who think that their lifestyle — driving, plane trips or maybe just leaf-blowing — adds too much climate-warming carbon dioxide to the air.

The guilty can now buy something called a "carbon offset." Essentially, you pay someone else to reduce or "offset" carbon emissions equal to your own.

It's a booming new trade, but the federal government is worried that consumers are getting ripped off.

However, if Congress does act, it should be skeptical of the merits of carbon offset schemes. Thus far, they have proven expensive and open to fraud and abuse.

This lack of sustainability points to the essence of the problem. Our current carbon footprint is too high, and the only long-term solution is to reduce carbon emissions, not to compensate them by carbon offset schemes. This is also why carbon offset schemes are opposed from an ethical viewpoint. They are considered as paying someone else for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and, as such, buying your way out of responsibility. And the schemes may distract attention from the real problem of how we reduce our own emissions. This is a double challenge for scientists. Finding new ways to decrease our society's greenhouse gas emissions is a major scientific challenge that merits our full attention. Considering whether the scientific value of a trip to the other end of the world outweighs the use of resources and the carbon footprint is a much more personal challenge.

Additionality and lack of regulation in the voluntary marketSeveral certification standards exist, offering variations for measuring emissions baseline, reductions, additionality, and other key criteria. However, no single standard governs the industry, and some offset providers have been criticized on the grounds that carbon reduction claims are exaggerated or misleading. Problems include:[61][62]

Widespread instances of people and organizations buying worthless credits that do not yield any reductions in carbon emissions.
Industrial companies profiting from doing very little – or from gaining carbon credits on the basis of efficiency gains from which they have already benefited substantially.
Brokers providing services of questionable or no value.
A shortage of verification, making it difficult for buyers to assess the true value of carbon credits.

Moonchild wrote: Mr. TPP, how does it make him a hypocrite to the environmental movement to have committed murder?

And what does his political affiliation have to do with being a murderer?

10. Global warming alarmism
9. Earth Day
8. Cap and trade
7. Green jobs
6. Environmental activism
5. Wind power hypocrisy
4. Hollywood hypocrisy
3. Carbon trading
2. Greenwashing

And the Number one Top Environmental Scam/Scam Artist/Joke....

1. Al Gore

Al Gore transformed his movie An Inconvenient Truth into a mega-money maker (see No. 4). What is truly inconvenient about his Nobel Prize-winning film were the 11 falsehoods that it contained, as determined by a British court, including the misleading suggestion that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=43111

For example, the predictions made at the first Earth Day in 1970 were wrong. No, wrong isn’t a strong enough word. They were spectacularly wrong. Let’s cover all the tenses and say they were wrong, they are wrong, and then make our own prediction and say they will be wrong in the future.

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist