Carbon Offsetting debacle
From an article in Saturday’s Guardian discussing carbon offsetting:
Dan Welch, a Manchester journalist who investigated offsetters for Ethical Consumer magazine, summarised it neatly: “Offsets are an imaginary commodity created by deducting what you hope happens from what you guess would have happened.“
Peak Oil
According to last night’s Future Shock: End of the Oil Age on RTE, it’s all kind-of irrelevant anyway. We’re going to run into economic meltdown before carbon offsetting even has half a chance to reduce global CO2 output. Who will really care about global warming when the oil runs out meaning they lose their job, everything doubles in price and they can’t afford to fill their SUV at the petrol station?
Rather worryingly, we in Ireland are particularly prone to oil shocks. Very little is grown/manufactured here. More-or-less everything (food, goods, people) has to be flown, or shipped here. And the internal distribution network is heavily based on HGVs and roads. Great when oil is cheap. Horribly expensive when it isn’t. Still…at least we have some wind, and lots of waves to generate energy in the future. Hopefully that means we won’t freeze (pending what happens to the gulf stream of course).
