The Chic Ecologist

Carbon Trading Scams – Who are you paying to reduce your footprint?

Ever bought a plane ticket and seen the little banner that says ‘offset your carbon emissions here’, or seen a company claim to be ‘carbon neutral’? More often than not, they are buying carbon credits.

Carbon footprints are all the rage right now, so much so that a whole new industry is being built on carbon credits or carbon offsetting as companies attempt to reduce their carbon emissions to look more green. I liken this to a way for people to make money off of the environmental movement by making a commodity out of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and trading it on the open market. And its not just Carbon Dioxide, just about every harmful emission is traded to some extent. This is ridiculous in so many ways it makes my head spin.

This can be great for small, specialized use, such as paying extra on your electric bill to use [and pay for the production of more] renewable energy sources such as wind farms, but as so often happens, it has been abused.

Since there is no regulating body or standard, anything from a dead mango grove to your backyard garden can be traded on the market for a profit. From oil companies generating electricity from illegal natural gas flaring in Nigeria (and thus claiming $1.5 million in offset credits a year), to chemical companies building $5 million incinerators to claim $500 million worth of destroyed HFCs (that they created).

Where it really hits the fan for me is how it can justify people living the same way they always have, with a huge carbon footprint, they only have to buy their way out of it and can be ‘carbon neutral’. I liken it to buying a ticket into heaven by paying for absolution rather than changing ones behavior, by paying into the system, one is supporting the renewable energy movement, and therefore gets a wash.

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Tags: Carbon Footprint, carbon offset, carbon trading, emissions, environmental impact

Cash for Clunkers – Eco Friendly or Environmental Mistake?

There has been a lot of news about the Car Allowance Rebate System or ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program, but the real question is will this benefit the environment? Conceived as a two-birds-with-one-stone program to boost our economy and remove older polluting cars from our roads, but is it working? The real answer is that we don’t know yet.

The original program developed by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, required bigger improvements in MPG to qualify. Luckily it seems “the good judgment of the American people” has proved to exceed even the original requirements.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said the average mileage of new vehicles purchased through the program is 9.6 miles per gallon higher than for the vehicles traded in for scrap. Buyers of new cars and trucks that get 10 mpg better than their trade-ins get the $4,500 rebate. People whose cars get between 4 mpg and 10 mpg better fuel efficiency qualify for a smaller $3,500 rebate.
-Associated Press

We should stop and recognize, however, that Miles Per Gallon (MPG) is not a very good indicator of actual fuel efficiency, especially at higher numbers. Look at the table below, and you can see that if you traded a car that got 40 mpg in for one that got 50 mpg, you would qualify for the higher rebate, however, it would be less efficient (less of an environmental impact) than moving from a 20 mpg car to a 25 mpg car.

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Tags: Automotive, Carbon Footprint, eco friendly, efficiency, environmental impact, recycled

Save Trees and Read Green with a Kindle

So the question on every green minded book fanatic, is the Amazon Kindle green? In short, yes, if you use it enough. The estimation, provided by the journal of Environmental Science and Technology, is that you can save approximately one tree per year if you replace your daily newspaper with the e-version.

That accounts for a  700 pound reduction in paper use just from the daily newspaper, add in another one or two pounds for each book and you are looking at quite a big tree.
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Tags: Carbon Footprint, Design, eco footprint, environmental impact, green