Check out video of a press conference the team over at CROC just did. They’re getting pretty desperate. They claim to have been endorsed by a "prominent environmental organization:"
There’s a bunch more of this type of insanity going on over at TheCROC.org. They have an “Earned Devastation Calculator” that lets you compute how much environmental devastation you’re “entitled” to based on the good things you’ve done for the environment. (Then you can Tweet the results or sending them to Facebook. It’s utterly shameless.)
A few days ago I wrote about carbon offsets, the push from corporate polluters to include them in the American carbon market that would be created by ACES, and why that’s such a bad idea. I also posted the PSA from a new organization called the Carbon Regulatory Offset Committee (CROC), which advocates expanding the offset program to individuals.
CROC is not promoting the voluntary offsets you might purchase to offset the carbon emissions from flying in a plane or powering your home. CROC is determined to give Americans the “right” to do harm to the environment in return for the good things they do for the environment – using the very same logic coporate polluters use when they argue that they should be allowed to continue dumping carbon emissions into our air in exchange for purchasing offsets to protect forests somewhere else in the world. The bottom line is that emissions must come down. Corporate polluters shouldn’t be able to buy their way out of it with offsets – which aren’t even a reliable trade-off by any measure.
Not only do offsets allow polluters to continue business as usual, but they’re difficult to measure reliably – especially over the long-term. In fact, the largest auditor of clean-energy projects in the world was just suspended by UN inspectors "after it was unable to prove its staff had properly vetted projects that were then approved for the [European] carbon-trading scheme."
Of course, the folks at CROC responded with a blog titled “The UN needs to take a chill pill."
