Global Warming Guilt $$

Carbon Offsets for Individual Drivers

By Richard Martin, 8-03-07

I’ve been writing this weekly Energy Grok for almost a year now, so it seems that a little full disclosure is in order. On the scale of major climate-changers, I’m a pretty small fish, but I’m still doing my part. Yes, I drive an SUV: a 2000 Toyota 4Runner. My rationalizations include a) I need 4WD to get up my driveway, especially in winter; b) I need plenty of space for camping and bicycling gear, my 7-year-old son’s sports kit, and so on; and c) I have a short commute to work and I ride my bike and/or take the bus a couple of times a week, so I drive about one-third less than the average American’s annual mileage.

That still leaves about 8,000 miles of driving, or around six-and-a-half tons of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, every year. So, maybe it’s time to do something about it, eh?

Like most Americans, I don’t see giving up driving altogether. So, I’ve found another option: a TerraPass. It’s a carbon-offset for individual drivers: buy a TerraPass of the appropriate price and they will use that money to fund clean-energy projects to balance out your carbon-dioxide emissions. “When you buy a TerraPass, you sponsor a guaranteed reduction in carbon dioxide emissions,” the Web site claims.

Though TerraPass assures consumers it’s audited by the non-profit Center for Resource Solutions, I’m sure a thorough crunch of the numbers would show that my purchasing a bumper sticker is not really completely offsetting my CO2 contributions. Does contributing 40 bucks to a wind-farm project guarantee a specific reduction in greenhouse gas? But it’s doing something. And all of us finding a way to do something strikes me as the only way out of the global-warming mess.

In other energy news:

-- Houston-based mid-major oil company Marathon Oil Corp. this week reached a $6.6 billion deal to buy out Western Oil Sands of Calgary, becoming “the latest American interest looking to secure a long-term supply of crude from Alberta’s oil sands.” By now, reports Geoffrey Styles writing on Energy Outlook, “most of the large integrated oil companies have expanded their portfolios to include these unconventional hydrocarbons.”

-- “Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America’s Biggest Political Boondoggles.” That’s the headline on the latest piece of balanced energy reporting from Rolling Stone, penned by Jeff Goodell. This is one of those pieces of journalism whose individual points are inarguable but that misses the larger point: if ethanol is a scam, what would you call the last half-century of oil-and-gas exploitation and the foreign policy it spawned?

-- Not such a scam is wind-power in Europe, which may one day benefit from a “grandiose plan” to link the Continent’s electricity grids, reports The Economist. A continent-wide power distribution system would solve the two main problems with wind power, according to the special report: “You don’t always get it where you want it and you don’t always get it when you want it.”

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