Beneath the feel-good simplicity of buying your way to carbon neutrality is a growing concern that the idea is more hype than solution.According to Native Energy, money from "An Inconvenient Truth," along with payments from others trying to neutralize their emissions, went to the developers of a methane collector on a Pennsylvanian farm and three wind turbines in an Alaskan village.As it turned out, both projects had already been designed and financed, and the contributions from Native Energy covered only a minor fraction of their costs. "If you really believe you're carbon neutral, you're kidding yourself," said Gregg Marland, a fossil-fuel pollution expert at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee who has been watching the evolution of the new carbon markets. "You can't get out of it that easily."The race to save the planet from global warming has spawned a budding industry of middlemen selling environmental salvation at bargain prices.
Monday, September 03, 2007
Can you buy a greener conscience?
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