"Wow, I can actually feel better about my carbon footprint!" So proclaimeth an unknown supporter on Carbonfund.org's website. According to Environmentalleader.com, VW's down with that. The environmental campaigners report that the German automaker will supply the "fund" in Carbonfund's plan to buy and reforest 1,100 acres of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, Louisiana. In case you're wondering how they do the math, "the offsets will be based on the average annual emissions for each different type of model sold in the four-month period." It's not an open-ended deal; VW will cover carbon emissions for vehicles sold from September 1, 2007 until January 2, 2008. But the company invites new owners to keep paying for their guilt environmental impact by continuing the offset arrangement into the new year. In fact, VeeDub's putting a "carbon calculator" on an official micro site hosted by… Carbonfund.org.
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Hey why not? I’m among those who say it’s better than nothing.
Now could we just have a gas tax and forget about all those CAFE increases?
AKM:
NO! we cannot have a gas tax! unless that tax goes *directly* to repairing existing infrastructure, it is wrong and doomed to misuse. penalty taxes only serve to move your wealth to the Man–who spends it doing things you hate.
let’s do some math:
increase the federal gas tax from 18.5cpg to $1.00 per gallon. a 32mpg mazda 3 is roughly $18000. you get $5000 to trade in your 20mpg vehicle. to recoup the $13000 difference, you’ll need to *save* 15950 gallons of gas. or in this case, drive over 850,000 miles. doesn’t pay.
and to anyone who believes the money will go straight infrastructure: pigeon shit.
OR… they could build a compact car that doesn’t get 22/30 MPG (by the EPA’s old reckoning!).
Someday, future generations will dig up a story like this and wonder what the hell we were thinking.
Just one man’s prediction. I could be wrong.
Paying into Al Gore’s carbon offset company reduces carbon emissions. You see, the more money he gets, the more he talks, the more he talks the more people fall alseep, and we all know that a sleeping person’s breathing rate is slower than an active person!
Hey, why not? If you’re going to use a gimmick to sell cars, why not something that’s vaguely positive for the planet?
Great, now how about doing something about product quality, so that I’d actually be able to buy a VW and drive it home from the dealership without bits falling off?
Something I’m wondering, though, is why is it necessary to inject Hillary and Al Gore into topics only vaguely (or not at all) related to them? Clearly, if upsetting the delicate constitutions of the remains of the right wing was paramount, my dream 2008 ticket would be Clinton/Gore, because they’re really getting your collective goat.
If you have to fight a person with insults rather than ideas, maybe you should rethink why you’re fighting them in the first place. I mean, it sounds like you guys think being boring or fat is a bigger crime than killing hundreds of thousands of people.
Offset. Hmmm.
They plant trees which apparently suck up the CO2 the car you bought will put out. This is assuming a lot of things, like it only lasts x years, does y mpg and of course none of this includes the CO2 involved in making the damn thing.
And then the trees with be felled and turned into paper and other things, and they will rot and put all that CO2 out again.
So this “offset” thing, where might it be ?
Um, I’d just like to give an “Amen” to NICKNICK
whitenose:
“Something I’m wondering, though, is why is it necessary to inject Hillary and Al Gore into topics only vaguely (or not at all) related to them?”
In this case it is related to Mr. Gore. After all, not only did he invent the internet, but he discovered global warming. ;^) But seriously, he is a rather huge proponent of carbon offsets and does in fact own part of one of the companies that does that sort of thing.
Max: so? There are a lot of proponents of carbon offsets. I don’t see their name dragged into every offset-related discussion in the blogosphere.
And NickNick: don’t think that the only public cost of driving is physical infrastructure. How about the licensing bodies, police departments (enforcement, accident investigation, etc.), first-responders such as fire departments, ambulance services, medevacs. Not too mention the harder-to-quantify costs such as environmental degredation, the impact on public health of air polution and smog, the cost of using military to secure foreign sources of oil, the cost of pandering to “friendlier” sources of oil.
The fact is, the externalized costs of consuming gasoline is largely paid from general revenues. So why not have gas taxes flow into the same place?
The problem, however, is that other taxes should be cut to keep additional gas taxes revenue-neutral. Unfortunately, government has never met a tax they liked to cut, so we just get hosed.
“Someday, future generations will dig up a story like this and wonder what the hell we were thinking.”
Thinking?
They will discover that government control of education, broadcasting, foodstuffs, medicine created a nation of insane and childish chumps.
dean :
August 30th, 2007 at 6:37 pm
“The fact is, the externalized costs of consuming gasoline is largely paid from general revenues. So why not have gas taxes flow into the same place?”
I’m fine with that as long as you then eliminate the taxes feeding the general revenue that is feeding these externalized costs. ADDING a gasoline tax just as a punitive measure is wrong wrong wrong.