Carbon Offset

Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon about 'going green'. Generally speaking, I think that is a good thing. We need to conserve our resources, water, energy etc.

However, this idea of 'paying a carbon offset' is a bunch of hooey! All it amounts to is someone has figured out a way to make money from 'going green'. You send them money to assuage your guilty conscience about using so much energy. They put the money to use and then sell what they do to people with more money than sense. There may be some of these folks who are really trying, but if you put ‘carbon offset’ into a Google search field, you will get almost two million hits. Figure it out.

Supposedly if you drive your car to work every day, go on a road trip or fly to your favorite vacation spot; you can 'pay' a carbon offset to make up for the pollution your car or airplane ride puts into the air. Nuts! I don't care how much you pay, the pollution is still there. You can pay all you want, no one has yet figured out a way to get paying money will remove the carbon that modern life has filled our atmosphere. True, there are projects that are trying to find ways to clean up the junk, but you can do your part by using some common sense.

Go green by turning off appliances when they are not being used. This includes lights and TVs. Replace your light bulbs with energy saving florescent bulbs. They do cost more, but last a lot longer and don't burn nearly as much energy. The old incandescent bulbs give off heat. If you live in any area that is hot and you have air conditioning, that heat just makes your cooling unit work that much harder.

There are so many ways to conserve energy. I won’t list them here, but nearly every utility company has a website with tons of ways to save energy listed.

Some of the projects that are supported by the ‘carbon offset’ sites include planting trees and shrubs. This is a good thing; planting trees and shrubs is always good. I think there is a society that has been practicing this for a very long time, The National Arbor Day Foundation.

They will send you free trees to plant. Just read this article The Carbon Neutral Myth! It is pretty large pdf file, but worth reading.

Martha