Originally posted 03/24/07
I have been reading and hearing about “off-sets” lately. Mostly in relation to how former Vice-President Al Gore uses a lot of off-sets, an awful lot of them. They are not free, unless of course your are purchasing the off-sets from your own company from which you get dividends and profits in which case they are certainly discounted, but as a rule off-sets cost money.
Here is a great question you can ask: What are off-sets? Evidently part of the anti-global warming, do your part, reduce your “carbon footprint” contribution to ozone depletion and eventual ocean level rising, movement is to purchase “off-sets” from companies that take your money to plant trees, remediate toxic dumps, install chimney filters in factories in Kuala Lumpur, underwrite a fleet of Toyota Prius’ for the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department and otherwise do “green” stuff. For a fee you can buy “carbon credits” or “off-sets” to compensate for the horrible activities you engage in that result in the habitants of Siberia needing SPF 45 and Katin surf trunks in mid-January. Confused? See if the following example sheds some California State Legislature approve low wattage fluorescent light on the subject:
Let us say that you live in the big city in a mid-Eastern/Southern state with little population. You are fairly well to do and after years of having a job for which you were hired you are forcibly retired from—perhaps even cheated out of—your career. Like many Americans with significant wealth you build a great big house, mansion would not be an inappropriate label, and because it is great and big it requires a lot of electricity and gas to keep the house lit, the pool heated and the place properly climatized from the weather—which seems to have been unseasonably warm particularly last August. All this seems “normal” until the utility bills hit and show that in August you consume more than two times as much energy to cool and light your home as the average American consumes—in a year. Quick review: you are rich, you own a big home, you consume twice as much energy in a month than the average American consumes in a year.
This is putting a lot more hydrocarbons into the ozone than is acceptable these days. So should you feel guilty? NO! You can buy carbon-credits or off-sets to make up for your wonton destruction of the ozone and assuage your guilt—if you have any. How wonderful is that? It gets even better however, since you are an owner of a company that sells these off-sets you can buy them from yourself, sort of like paying the wife to pick up the dry cleaning while she pays you to get a gallon of milk on the way home from the office. Great deal, eh? Not great enough? How about making it even better by deflecting any criticism for your abhorrent consumption by making speeches and movies about how evil mankind is by engaging in behavior and living their lives in such a way as to destroy our environment and push the globe to the edge of destruction; behavior such as consuming twenty four times as much energy as the average American family (who we all know is an energy hog). Oh, and you get an Oscar at the Academy Awards. How great is this?!?
This got me to wondering, I can use some off-sets. How I can get them. I am not really interested in carbon off-sets, I don’t think I can afford enough to off-set Cooper the family canine’s frequent contributions to greenhouse gasses much less off-set heating a home and the family mini van traveling to school, violin lessons, volunteer meetings, gymnastics, ballet classes, Old Navy… No I want off-sets for me—I want to model myself after Kilowatt Al and it appears that the whole purpose of off-sets is to try to buy myself out of bad personal behavior and hypocrisy. Hey, it works for him.
I want to buy an off-set so I do not have to pick up Cooper’s deposits around the neighborhood every morning on our 6:00 a.m. stroll. How much do I have to donate to the ASPCA to not have to go through the Cooper-pooper-scooper routine a few times every morning? I know the neighbors will still have a pile of Cooper off-sets on their front lawn to deal with, but under the theory of off-sets my actions that adversely affects others is irrelevant as long as I buy my off-set. So what is fair? A dollar an off-set per Cooper off-set left behind? I can live with that, can the neighbors? Al says, “who cares, you got your off-sets.”
I need weekend off-sets. I want to sit on the couch and drink some beer and watch baseball/football/golf and ignore the kids and the fact that Leslie wants me to weed the garden, fix the back gate, clean the windows and play with the kids. Where do I even go for this one? Donations to 4-H, the Home Depot Foundation, and PAL? Making this prohibitively expensive would be the spousal off-set, I think that may require a transfer of funds at Nordstrom, Tiffany or Dior. If Al can buy off the media and Hollywood for 20,000 kilowatts in August can’t I buy a weekend on the couch?
I know I should exercise more, eat better and less and off-set quite a few carbons from my midsection—I keep hoping there is a way I can purchase some Husky Guy off-sets but my friend Doctor Larry tells me they don’t exist so get to work. So I have to drive my Honda Pilot (best mileage in its class I read) past In-N-Out, but Al gets to have his fleet of Suburbans for he and his Secret Service detail drive around town to give speeches on how my Pilot should be an alternative fuel vehicle.
There are plenty more off-sets I am willing to investigate but I do not think any of them are as sweet a deal as Al Gore is getting in the free pass he gets from his fellow wealthy members of the Do-As-I-Say-Not-As-I-Do global warming hypocrites. While the Academy was bragging about the Awards show being “totally green” this year, how many Hummer Limos were idling on Sunset Boulevard? How many private jets carrying two or three people were burning fuel and sending exhaust into the ozone zoomed from London and New York to LAX for the Academy Awards while passing commercial planes with empty first class seats? How many of those giving Kilowatt Al a standing ovation had similar or bigger carbon footprints as his mansion in Tennessee?
In the meantime true off-sets can reduce emissions and these same people oppose the simple measures that can be enacted. The population of California is expected to keep growing for the next three decades, and there is no plan to increase the production of electricity this growing population will require. Meanwhile our current power plants are old, out of date and spew emissions into the atmosphere. There is a very clean, efficient off-set to these plants: nuclear power plants. France and other European get the majority of their electricity from nuclear plants, something we should emulate, more power, cleaner air—good off-set.
Quit the hypocrisy and the preaching. Instead of trying to scare me and tell me what I am doing wrong and pandering to the press and the Liberal and Hollywood Elite, I wish Mr. Gore and his fan club would own up to their own actions and engage in positive workable solutions that can have an immediate impact and help future generations. Pressure Sacramento and Austin and Denver and Washington D.C. to enable the building of more nuclear power plants—that is an off-set that will benefit my children and my grandchildren.
I have to go, I need to log on to Netflix to move “Caddyshack” up my queue again to off-set my neighbor getting “Inconvenient Truth”.