Comment of the week
It’s from ST reader Great White Rat, who recently made an interesting discovery about the Goracle:
More Gore nonsense. This is from the original article in the Nasville newspaper when the story broke:
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, she said.
So just for chuckles, go google Generation Ivestment Management. And you find that its chairman is – you guessed it – still Al Gore.
In other words, unless Gore is not taking a salary from GIM – which is a for-profit company – he’s buying the ‘carbon offsets’ from himself. Or, as someone more cynical might put it, he’s just reinvesting in his own company.
It seems to be sort of a money-laundering arrangement, using the skills he demonstrated so ably back in his Buddhist-monk-campaign-contribution days.
Now knowing that, it’s even more unsurprising that Gore dislikes balanced reporting on the issue of global warming.
Speaking of, Lorie Byrd has a fun piece posted today at Townhall.com where she talks about carbon offsets, Gore, and other hypocritical limousine liberals:
Putting aside for the moment whether or not anything man can do can affect global climate change, the concept of offsets presents some interesting political challenges for those promoting it.
One of those challenges is moral and ethical in nature. If global warming is truly a dire threat to the existence of life on earth as Gore and others claim, and if human activity contributes to the problem, what could possibly justify the excessive (I would even say obscene) energy consumption of Gore and other limousine liberals? If paying someone else to behave better than you do (through offsets) is a sufficient answer, I have to wonder just how real the problem is. I also wonder just how much bad behavior can be forgiven with the purchase of offsets.
Would Gore be as enthusiastic to embrace the use of offsets when it comes to other human activity that impacts the environment? The possibilities abound. How about a Litter Offset, for example? Could purchasing an offset make it okay to throw a fast food wrapper and aluminum can out of a car window? Let’s say an individual could purchase an offset that would pay for a couple of people with those pointy sticks to pick up trash on the roadside for an hour. Since even that small clean up crew would certainly pick up more trash in an hour than the original fast food wrapper and aluminum can that were discarded, it would seem the environment would be in much better shape as a result of the Litter Offset. It sounds like a winning plan to me. Offsets for everyone!
How about a Toxic Waste Offset? Companies that dump toxic waste into the waterways could absolve themselves of any responsibility for the way they affect the environment by purchasing offsets. The offsets could go to clean up dumpsites and to incentives paid to companies that don’t dump. How about Oil Spill Offsets for big oil polluters?
My personal favorite offset idea is one I call the Aqua Net Offset. This offset would allow chicks with big hair (and select male news reporters) to pay others not to use aerosol hairspray, thereby offsetting their own excessive consumption. Just consider the impact of the Donald Trump offset alone! It might reduce greenhouse gases more than all of Al Gore’s carbon offsets combined. Follow me on this one. Last year it was reported (LINK) that one result of efforts to reduce chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was that some of the chemicals that replaced them in refrigerants and aerosols, while better for the ozone layer, “act as a reflective layer in the atmosphere that traps heat like a greenhouse.” The fix for the ozone layer contributed to greenhouse gases, which many believe contribute to global warming. My Aqua Net Offset could have prevented all that and might just have kept Big Hair in style, as well. (Okay, admittedly that is a drawback.)
Read the rest here.
Check out related thoughts from The Anchoress, Ian at Hot Air, Tennessean Bill Hobbs, and Dan Riehl, Jeff Goldstein, Tigerhawk, Noel Sheppard at Newsbusters
Update I: Doug Ross has come up with a way for you to print your own carbon credits 
Update II: Props also go to ST reader TXMarko, who was on the ball on this back on Feb. 5th. Sorry for overlooking your comment, TX!