Max Embraces "Carbon Credits"

The most recent missive from the office of Montana's senior senator proudly proclaims Max Baucus has bought into the 'carbon neutral" racket currently being perpetrated by guilt-ridden moralists as the latest cure for global warming.

What Max's press release didn't say was the company he's using to purchase his "offsets," Native Energy, was the same one used by Al Gore's production company for An Inconvenient Truth. Max, much like Al Gore, somehow believes that spending money for carbon offsets absolves him of any responsibility for carbon emissions. But what if it doesn't work out according to plans?

The LA Times exposes voluntary carbon offsets as an ineffective way to help the planet, but a great way for companies offering carbon neutrality to get rich quick, and highlights more than just a few instances of Native Energy not making good on the promises made to their naive clientele.

But the industry is clouded by an approach to carbon accounting that makes it easy to claim reductions that didn't occur. Many projects that have received money from offset companies would have reduced emissions by the same amount anyway.

"These offsets are not addressing the problem that must be addressed now," said James Hansen, NASA's top climate researcher. "If we just fool around with marginal things, we will be up a creek without a paddle in the rather near future."

In the case of Native Energy...

It was a ridiculously good deal with one problem: So far, it has not led to any additional emissions reductions.

In the beginning, there were good intentions.

The race to save the planet from global warming has spawned a budding industry of middlemen selling environmental salvation at bargain prices.

The "voluntary carbon offset" companies developed a plan.

The companies take millions of dollars collected from their customers and funnel them into carbon-cutting projects, such as tree farms in Ecuador, windmills in Minnesota and no-till fields in Iowa.

The plan had a bit of a glitch.

... the industry is clouded by an approach to carbon accounting that makes it easy to claim reductions that didn't occur. Many projects that have received money from offset companies would have reduced emissions by the same amount anyway.

I don't use the word "scam" lightly. It appears I am not the only one.

The growing popularity of offsets has now prompted the Federal Trade Commission to begin looking into the $55-million-a-year industry.

... Several environmental and clean energy groups have also raised concerns about verifying projects, monitoring their actual carbon reductions and ensuring that each carbon offset is not sold more than once.

Another way to think of this as a potential scam is to look closely at how the business operates, what it claims to do, and what it actually does.

... a windmill project that the cooperative was building in the Yup'ik Eskimo village of Kasigluk, a soggy patch of tundra on the remote Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in western Alaska.

The cooperative sold 25 years of carbon dioxide reductions to Native Energy for $36,000 -- roughly $4 a ton.

Native Energy had contributed just over 1% of the total cost of the project yet claimed 100% of its carbon reductions.

I care not a single iota if Max chooses to waste his campaign contributions on carbon credits. I just hope his campaign isn't putting a new spin on that famous verse from Ecclesiastes, "Cast your bread upon the water...and it will come back to you one hundred-fold." In Max's case, lets just hope he doesn't plan to cast his supposed carbon neutrality upon the masses in the hope it returns campaign contributions from Native Energy, and other useful idiots.

Mike