When the Tories released their Clean Air act, the biggest shot across the bow that the other parties made had to do with the reduction of green house gases with targets going out to 2050.
Well Lorrie Goldstein has done a bit of very smart math that may make people like Elizabeth May head for a washcloth to wipe the egg off their faces.
“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, assuming none is destroyed by fire, disease or insects. If they are, they’ll release their carbon back into the atmosphere.
(bolded emphasis mine)
This is one of those tidy little facts you keep in your pocket for when an environmentalist complains about the Tory play taking 45 years to reach fruition.
And if you happen to be one of those who believes that offsetting is a good plan then I highly urge you save your soul by taking part in my very own OfficiallyScrewed Offsetting Program.
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I’d like to hear David Suzuki’s response to Lorrie’s column. (or May’s; or Dion’s; or Jack’s).
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It gets even better.
Algore is paying his carbon offset money…. to himself. It’s a scam and the MSM is playing along.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54528
“Al Gore defends his extraordinary personal energy usage by telling critics he maintains a “carbon neutral” lifestyle by buying “carbon offsets,” but the company that receives his payments turns out to be partly owned and chaired by the former vice president himself.
Gore has built a “green money-making machine capable of eventually generating billions of dollars for investors, including himself, but he set it up so that the average Joe can’t afford to play on Gore’s terms,” writes blogger Dan Riehl….”
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Gwgm, that’s quite the eye-opener. Thanks for the link.
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Carbon offsetting is like saying, “Its okay to piss on my pantleg as long as you pay for the cleaning”.
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Create your own carbon sink. Throw all your old newspapers in the landfill.
Then you can buy more newspapers that are grown from trees that are removed from the forest. If the trees stay there, they just decompose back into carbon dioxide or burn and return their carbon to the atmosphere that way. So use all the wood you can and heave all the newspapers in the landfill. Make room for more trees in the forest.
Tell your green friends how you think globely and act locally.
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It is so interesting the correlation, between what Gore and the environmentalists are doing by making this into a religion. Gore and those like him, the Suzuki’s of this world are the messiahs who are gaining a following and becoming the new saints of this green world. They even have their own way of tithing for the cause, carbon credits. I find the whole thing ludicrous and thoroghouly distasteful the way that they are turning this into a religion
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Mary, I agree – especially if Gore is getting some kind of kick back on this.
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Reforestation is generally discredited as a “green” answer, as most feel any such solution would require long-term sequestration of the carbon. So harvesting a forest for replantation and burying the wood in an old open pit mine _might_ work. And might be cheaper and easier than recapturing CO2 from the atmosphere with scrubbers, and dropping it in pools at the bottom of the ocean.
I’ve also seen numbers indicating that every human emits an average 100W continually, suggesting that obesity is really the cause of global warming 🙂
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Paul, don’t bury it in an old coal mine, store it in the walls of your house as 2X4’s or in the form of an oak kitchen table.