POAC: Let me guess, Gore supported the work of this company so much that he invested in them.

There's a difference between saying "invest in these companies because it's a good investment" and saying "invest in these companies because if you don't you're a horrible person who doesn't care about the Earth." One is honest salesmanship. The other is a play on guilt. (Johann Tetzel had a similar racket going during the Middle Ages.)

Skleenar: And each time, it doesn't mention the company that the Inconvenient Truth website recommends as a place to buy carbon offsets. You would think that Gore would instead direct people to his own company, no?

So I looked at the company. NativeEnergy is a privately-held equity firm owned by a consortium of several midwestern Indian tribes looking to develop wind farms, which happen to be located on Indian reservations. (Follow the links on the site, they're all there.) Now, there's nothing wrong with that, this is just good old fashioned American capitalism (though with the guilt angle mentioned above.) But saying that either of these companies "offset" anyone's carbon output is flat dishonest. Building wind farms alone doesn't take CO2 out of the atmosphere, if anything it is a negligable increase (unless the wind farms just appear out of nowhere, they have to be manufactured and constructed, which takes energy just like anything else, which, if they get it from CO2-producing power sources, results in more CO2 in the atmosphere.) Now, if this fund were, for example, buying up and closing coal power plants, that would be a real carbon offset. Of course, nobody would invest money in a company that did that, because nobody would make a profit.

You want to invest your money in this stuff, go ahead. If you make a profit, good for you. But don't try to claim sainthood because of it. You're trying to make a buck and sell a product. Just like everyone else.

Skleenar: That's an interesting point. Please find an example that makes it applicable to this thread.

I was trying not to bring up the entire analogy, but what the hell. Carbon offsets have been compared (accurately IMO, and not just by conservatives) to the Catholic church's practice of selling indulgences, which promised absolution from sin in exchange for money. (It was Tetzel's abuse of this system that inspired Luther to write the 95 Theses and inadvertently set off the Protestant Reformation.) Carbon offsets promise exactly the same deal... "sin" (i.e. produce carbon) all you want, then just pay some money and all is forgiven. No need to actually not sin. And of dubious effectiveness. Same sales pitch, 500 years apart.

inTheJungle: This is where you are wrong. More wind farms mean that power generation companies do not have to rely on fossil fuels as much to generate power.

This is true, provided that demand for electricity is constant...

This means less CO2 in atmosphere in the future.

Not necessarily. The key part is what you do with the CO2-producing plants. If you keep them online to generate power because it's either keep up with demand or cause rolling blackouts for your customers, then you're not going to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. I know at this point you're going to say "why not conserve power?" Energy conservation is an asymptotic thing - every step closer you take to your goal is more difficult and expensive. There comes a point where you can only do more with more. And as long as America's population is growing and demanding jobs and a single family home, power demand is going to go up. The only way to get around that is to impose heavy restrictions on energy production and use and simultaneously DVDA the American economy. Yes, there are plenty of arguments for getting rid of coal/oil/gas fired power plants. But carbon "offsets," at least the ones Al Gore is hawking, aren't persuasive.

Skleenar: Why is it that so many otherwise intelligent people seem to feign stupidity when making politial points?

Well, I imagine the emperor considered the boy who told the crowd said emperor had no clothes on was pretty stupid, too.

First off: Yes it takes energy to build windmills--no one doubts that. But if you invest some energy (which probably means carbon emissions) into making the wind generator, it then will produce future energy without emissions. If the ratio of energy used to make said wind generator to energy said wind generator will produce over it's lifetime is not somehwere near zero, you have serious problems with your wind generator design.

This is true. I should have been clearer on that. The actual CO2 output from producing wind generators is so miniscule as to be non-existent.

Secondly: Yes, windfarms do help the climate problem in that every megawatt generated with wind is a megawatt that is not generated by fossil fuels. Which, then, reduces the rate at which carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere.

As I said, this depends on actually taking the CO2-producing power plants offline. If you don't do that, you haven't done anything in terms of CO2 output.

Thirdly: Simply taking a chunk of x number of tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere is chump change. The major effect we can have is by affecting the rate at which we dump the stuff into the air. Thus the most powerful way we can do so is through changing the infrastructure we have that produces CO2 and substituting something else; which is exactly what companies like Native Energy do.

NativeEnergy's investments are half the problem. But in terms of actually reducing CO2 output...well, they just don't do that. It's like those disclaimers on weight-loss supplements... the pills may help a bit on the margin, but if you really want to lose weight, eat better and exercise. No other way around it.

Lastly: If enough of these sorts of sustainable energy sources were built, we could close down coal plants--We just don't have enough capacity now. There is no need to buy them.

Unless someone figures out a way to turn the wind on and off at will, you're going to need a power source that you can. (The laws of politics are trumped by the laws of physics.) This means either fossil fuels, hydro, or nuclear. Those are your choices. (Personally, I'd like to see next-gen nuclear reactors, and lots of them. But that's just me.)