I ran across this a few days ago, and may have mentioned it to a few people: a company is offering people the chance to buy back their carbon emissions from driving their vehicles. It’s called TerraPass, and they sell a little window sticker that says you’ve paid about $50/year to assure that the CO2 emissions your vehicle creates are bought back as carbon credits, or invested in clean energies such as wind. In other words, you can make your contribution to global warming by driving nil.
Americans overwhelmingly believe that science, and technology will save us from our self-induced greenhouse problem. Not many, I would wager, think that capitalism can help the cause as well. The idea of trading carbon credits was invented quite a while ago (and was cause for the 1991 Nobel Prize). Carbon credits are basically a permit that gives a company or farm the right to emit a certain amount of CO2. Kyoto Protocol countries are using these heavily, and the US is not much more than a bit player. But, trading carbon credits is a global market, and it won’t be long before the US needs to get in on the game as well.
Okay, so, what TerraPass does is to sell you an annual membership that’s worth a certain number of tons (3-10, depending on your vehicle and driving habits) of CO2, with the guarantee that those tons of CO2 will be removed from emissions elsewhere in the wold. What an amazing idea! The window sticker is something to show off, the internet is a great tool for spreading the message, and a large (even tens of thousands) group of like-minded drivers can really start to make a public statement that our science-shy administration might even listen to.
So, while science and technology work on the whole hydrogen economy thing, we all can use the internet and capitalism to help save the planet despite our short-sighted political system. I calculated Cheryl and my carbon emissions to be 20,000 lbs, and two window stickers will cost us $80/year. Zero-emissions (net) vehicles here we come!
