Feb 23 2007
Sin Eater Business Now Thriving Again
You have to love capitalism. All the global angst about perceived warming has created a hugely profitable market for “emissions offsets.” The laughable Kyoto Treaty created this scheme to penalize healthy economies for their presumed guilty environmental habits. Lately eco-loons have found that they too can assuage their guilty consciences for driving, eating red meat, or (ahem) flatulating. Breitbart has this piece:
China, India Smile as West Overpays for Climate
By Andy Mukherjee
Feb. 21 (Bloomberg) — Governments in rich nations are spending billions of dollars to buy a clearer conscience over climate change. Are they getting their money’s worth?
Enlightened individuals, those who stay awake at nights wondering what they can do to prevent the polar caps from melting, at least have a growing menu of choices.
Sydney-based Easy Being Green says it will mitigate your cat’s flatulent contribution to global warming for A$8 ($6). The same company could also make your granny “carbon-neutral” at A$10 a year, according to a report in the Australian newspaper last weekend.
Then there’s Carbon Planet Pty, another company cited in the article. If you are hopping on a short-haul flight between Sydney and Canberra, and feeling bad about the damage you are doing to the ecosystem, you can buy credits worth A$23, for which the Adelaide-based company will guarantee to keep 1 ton of carbon dioxide out of the air for 100 years.
By comparison, the governments that have undertaken to cut greenhouse emissions under the United Nations’ Kyoto Convention on Climate Change have chosen a tougher — and more expensive — route to guilt reduction.
Michael Wara, formerly of Stanford University’s Program in Energy and Sustainable Development and now a lawyer at Holland & Knight LLP in San Francisco, made that point in a much-publicized article in the science journal Nature this month.
Countries that must purchase emission credits to atone for their higher-than-mandated production of carbon dioxide are paying a tiny group of chemical manufacturers in China and India massive sums to reduce industrial gases and methane, which are rather inexpensive to capture and destroy, Wara says.
The improvement that can be obtained by spending just $31 million on incinerators could cost developed nations as much as 750 million euros ($986 million) through the elaborate trading mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, and even then only two-thirds of the problem would go away, Wara estimates.
I am just in the wrong business. I want to be an enviro-sin eater. I’ll make a fortune.
