Update for March 10

This is true:

Planting trees won’t save us, ethanol isn’t cool, and rebuilding a city below sea level is insane

“Green” celebrities often claim to reduce their carbon imprint to zero when flying around the world by buying “carbon offsets”. One popular way of doing this is by planting trees.

Let’s do the math. It takes 15 trees 40 to 50 years to absorb five tons of carbon.

A return flight from Toronto to Vancouver injects 5.4 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per passenger. Carbon dioxide takes 50 to 200 years to dissipate naturally.

Therefore, to absorb most of the carbon dioxide caused by one passenger taking one domestic round-trip flight across Canada in 2007, requires planting 15 trees today that won’t complete the job until 2047-2057, assuming none is destroyed by fire, disease or insects. If they are, they’ll release their carbon back into the atmosphere.

In the Herald Tribune today there is an article Global Carbon Offsets by Gregg Easterbrook.
He checked Gore’s power bills and carbon use on TerraPass web site. So basically Gore excess caused 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gases annually, the equivalent of 20 Hummers. And so he pays $1,247.50 to offset it (the equivalent of 20,000 trees planted annually! Apparently the economies of scale of carbon trading allow this mostly to be used to offset landfill methane emissions. So Easterbrook is condescending to this stuff, but again, I think it is nonsense.

Updated March 6
I’ve updated this because this post is not surprise. Carbon trading is hypocrisy. Just be more humble and use less!

Gore Buys Carbon Offsets from Himself to Rationalize His Energy Wasting Lifestyle

Intuitively I think this as well. Just fix it.

More myths about carbon offsets | Gristmill: The environmental news blog | Grist