This Blog is NOT Carbon Neutral

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.  I celebrated by burning fossil fuels on the Beltway for about 3.5 hours during my commute to and from the office today.  Normally I only spend about 2 hours on the Beltway, but today was special.  This evening, I plan to celebrate a little more by promising to Save Water and Drink Wine instead.

Let me get more to the point of the title of this blog post. Over the weekend, I was visiting several other blogs in the blogging networks that I belong to.  I came across at least a dozen blogs that proudly proclaimed that their blog was carbon neutral.   Each of them also had a button similar to this one:

Essentially, the button leads to a website that promises to plant a tree if you register your blog with them.  The planting of the tree is supposed to offset carbon emissions of your blog.  I considered registering for a moment or two, but only because I like the idea of planting trees.  I like trees.  However, I decided against it because I find the whole idea of carbon offsets to be a bit suspicious at best and reprehensible at worst.

The idea of buying carbon offsets to compensate for your carbon footprint has been compared to the old Catholic Church practice of selling indulgences for the forgiveness of sins.  Al "I invented the internet" Gore emits a hell of a lot of carbon, but proudly proclaims that he purchases offsets to neutralize those emissions.  What he doesn't tell us is that he purchases them from a company that he helped found.

Instead, I kind of like the program that I read about in the Daily Caller today.  They have launched the Daily Caller Offset-Offset program.  For a small donation, they will help you to offset the offsets purchased by your liberal environmentalist friend. For example, if they buy an offset to neutralize their carbon, the Daily Caller will start a tire fire to offset that offset.  To close out this Earth Day post, here is the late great George Carlin expressing his views on the environmentalists and their desire to "Save the Planet."