http://www.ecotality.com/blog/?p=350February 28, 2007
Why the Gore Story MattersFiled under: eco-friendly, Al Gore, global warming, Carbon Dioxide Emissions
— Bill Hobbs @ 10:49 am
As the controversy over global warming doomsayer Al Gore’s voracious energy-eater mansion rolls on, there’s an angle I think merits deeper investigation than it is currently getting. While much of the focus has been on whether or not Gore is an environmental hypocrite, the story has raised the profile of the role of “carbon offsets” in achieving a “greener,” more environmentally friendly world.
In its original story, The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville reported that Gore buys “carbon offsets” to compensate for his home’s use of energy from carbon-based fuels. What is a “carbon offset,” exactly? Essentially, it’s a payment someone makes to an environmentally friendly entity to compensate for personally using non-green energy.
As Wikipedia explains, a carbon offset “is a service that tries to reduce the net carbon emissions of individuals or organizations indirectly, through proxies who reduce their emissions and/or increase their absorption of greenhouse gases.” Wikipedia goes on to explain that “a wide variety of offset actions are available; tree planting is the most common. Renewable energy and energy conservation offsets are also popular, including emissions trading credits.”
So far, so good. So, where does Gore buy his ‘carbon offsets’? According to The Tennessean newspaper’s report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman:
Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe…
As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he “buys” his “carbon offsets” from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn’t buy “carbon offsets” through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks.
And it is not clear at all that Gore’s stock purchases - excuse me, “carbon offsets” purchases - actually help reduce the use of carbon-based energy at all, while the gas lanterns and other carbon-based energy burners at his house continue to burn carbon-based fuels and pump carbon emissions - a/k/a/ “greenhouse gases” - into the atmosphere.
As the news media swarmed around the story of Gore’s gargantuan energy consumption yesterday, Gore’s people touted his purchase of “carbon offsets” as evidence that he lives a “carbon-neutral” lifestyle, but the truth is Gore’s home uses electricity that is, for the most part, derived from the burning of carbon fuels. His house gets its electricity from Nashville Electric Service, which gets its from the Tennessee Valley Authority, which produces most of its power from coal-burning power plants. Which means most of the power being consumed at the Gore mansion comes from carbon-emitting power sources.
But do Gore’s “carbon offsets” payments really compensate for his big non-green power usage?
Wikipedia again:
The intended goal of carbon offsets is to combat global warming. The appeal of becoming “carbon neutral” has contributed to the growth of voluntary offsets, which often are a more cost-effective alternative to reducing one’s own fossil-fuel consumption. However, the actual amount of carbon reduction (if any) from an offset project is difficult to measure, largely unregulated, and vulnerable to misrepresentation.
Did you get that? Carbon offsets are an “alternative to reducing one’s own fossil-fuel consumption” and yet “the actual amount of carbon reduction (if any) from an offset project is difficult to measure, largely unregulated, and vulnerable to misrepresentation.”
One way to misrepresent things: Tell a newspaper your stock purchases are really purchases of “carbon offsets.”
Gore travels the nation and the world blaming man’s use of carbon-based energy for global warming - burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel as he goes. His efforts are being rewarded. Politically, he’s helped put climate change at the top of the national and even global agenda. And that has driven up the perceived prospects and in many cases the stock value of companies viewed as “green” or environmentally friendly.
Companies like those his investment management firm invest his own and other peoples’ money in. (You can see a list of Generation Investment Management’s holdings here, courtesy of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.)
As one commenter posting on a few blogs covering the Gore story yesterday put it:
Hmmm. The Goracle is chairman and a founding partner of Generation Investment Management LLP, a boutique international investment firm that invests other peoples’ money, for a fee, into the stocks of ‘green’ companies. … So when Al beats the drum for possible future global warming, he’s also drumming up business.
And profiting from hyping the “global warming” crisis.
In a nutshell, Gore consumes large amounts of carbon-based electricity while he trumpets the global warming crisis that drives up the value of “green” companies like the ones in which he buys carbon offsets invests in their stocks.
And “carbon offsets” are a dodgy way for someone to claim to be carbon-neutral even as they consume large amounts of carbon-based energy. The notion that selling carbon offsets actually helps the environment is taken as a given by those who sell them and by those who buy them, but at this point it is unproven.
While some bloggers and pundits have likened “carbon offsets” to the “indulgences” the pre-Reformation Catholic Church sold to the wealthy so they could continue to sin (see video at end of this post), the writer of the blog The Virginian says carbon offsets are more like the “sumptuary laws” of medieval times, laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions on clothing, food, and luxury expenditures.
In the Late Middle Ages sumptuary laws were instated as a way for the nobility to cap the conspicuous consumption of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie of medieval cities. … The danger is that the use of “carbon offsets” will create two things that re morally monstrous: a de-facto sumptuary law and the impoverishments of the poor and powerless of this planet. The creation of an aristocratic elite that differentiates itself from the hoi polloi by its ability to buy “carbon offsets” while the rest of the planet is forced by environmental laws into a smaller and smaller carbon straightjacket is not so far fetched.
Read the whole thing.
None of this should be construed as me not believing in global warming. I do believe the planet is getting warmer. I don’t necessarily agree that man’s activities are the primary or even significant cause of that warming - after all, the Earth warmed up significantly centuries before the Industrial Age, and there is plenty of evidence that cyclical solar activity impacts the earth’s temperatures.
But burning fossil fuels is stupid even if it doesn’t contribute a whit to global warming - petroleum can be used to make products that are much more valuable than gasoline and jet fuel, and even if carbon pollution doesn’t cause global warming, it is pollution that makes the air we breathe dirty and fouls the land and the water. And then of course there’s that whole problem of the geopolitical issues of oil and that related problem of buying oil from societies from whence come people who want to kill us.
As the story evolves, it should move away from Gore’s “Gulfstream Liberal” hypocrisy and on to more important questions such as the efficacy of “carbon offsets,” and a variety of other economy-oriented policy issues that impact the environment, such as whether market-based solutions or government-planned approaches are more likely to foster the technology innovation and lifestyle choice changes that benefit the environment.
Hypocrisy, after all, abounds. Even Gore’s huge electric power usage at his Nashville home isn’t the only example of how the prophet of environmental doom hasn’t always lived as if he believes his message. During the eight years Gore was vice president, he voted in four national elections. Every single time, he and his entourage and security detail and accompanying media flew to Nashville on a large government jet, burning thousands of gallons of fossil fuels and pumping huge amounts of carbon emissions directly into the earth’s atmosphere, and then rode in a caravan of fossil fuel-burning vehicles from Nashville International Airport about 40 miles east on I-40 to Carthage, Tennessee, so the local and national TV cameras could get video of him at the voting booth. And then the whole caravan headed back to Nashville for the plane ride back to DC. Traffic had to be halted on Nashville’s interstates and side streets every time - sometimes during rush hour - idling thousand of vehicles that just sat there, burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon pollution, just so Gore could create a media photo-op.
He could have instead voted by mailing in an absentee ballot - that would have been the “green” thing to do - and a skillful press aide could easily have turned that into a widely publicized pro-green photo-op.
And, finally, for laughs, Jim Treacher’s house of bloggage The Daily Gut has this to say about Gore’s electric usage:
It’s great that he’s using solar panels and all that, but notice he’s not disputing how huge his electric bill still is. What the hell is he doing in there? Is he a Terminator from the future and requires constant recharging? (That would explain pretty much everything.)
Yes it would.
UPDATE: Via the blog on the website of carbon offsets marketer TerraPass I found a recent New York Times story that is skeptical of carbon offsets.
Some carbon-offset firms have begun to acknowledge that certain investments like tree-planting may be ineffective, and they are shifting their focus to what they say is reliable activity, like wind turbines, cleaner burning stoves, or buying up credits that otherwise would allow companies to pollute.
Still, as demand for greener living grows, the number of companies jumping into the game has multiplied. At least 60 companies sold offsets worth about $110 million to consumers in Europe and North America in 2006, up from only about a dozen selling offsets worth $6 million in 2004, according to Abyd Karmali of ICF International.Yet another perverse effect, say critics, is that some types of carbon-offset initiatives may actually slow the changes aimed at coping with global warming by prolonging consumers’ dependence on oil, coal and gas, and encouraging them to take more short-haul flights and drive bigger cars than they would otherwise have done.
Climate Care, for example, has linked up with Land Rover, a maker of sport utility vehicles, to help the company offset its own emissions. As part of a promotional program, Climate Care also helps purchasers of new Land Rovers offset their first 45,000 miles of driving.
In that way, the program may actually help sell “larger cars with higher emissions” and thus contribute more to global warming, according to Mary Taylor, a campaigner with the energy and climate team at Friends of the Earth.
The words “snake oil” come to mind…
Too bad that $110 million that well-intentioned but gullible folks spent on “carbon offsets” couldn’t have been invested in developing hydrogen fuel-cell technology closer to the point that it can replace the internal combustion engine. That’s a “carbon offset” that will actually make a difference.
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