Paying For Your Pollution
August 28th, 2006 | by Ken Grandlund |British Petroleum has not only admitted that carbon dioxide contributes to global climate change, they’ve developed a program to help you reduce the effects of your polluting gas guzzler. Called Target Neutral, the basic premise is that you give BP a certain amount of money (based on your vehicle model and driving habits) which they in turn will funnel to third world projects that are supposed to reduce an equal amount of CO2.
It’s called ‘cancelling out’ your carbon emissions. The concept doesn’t ask you to actually reduce your own emissions by changing your personal habits or by switching to an alternative fuel source for vehicles of home energy. Instead, they just want you to give them some money and trust that they are going to use it to create ‘green’ energy somewhere else in the world. Currently, they purportedly have several ongoing projects in India.
While in theory this might seem like a practical solution, the reality is more akin to breaking the law and paying a fine, then going right back out and breaking the law again. The solution to reducing carbon dioxide emissions isn’t to send your money to the oil companies, especially companies that have shown such disdain for real environmental problems like their disintegrating Alaskan pipeline. The real solution lies in demanding that companies and governments move forward boldly in developing new clean energy while providing consumers with a real choice of products and utilities and incentives.
That BP repeatedly refers to their “Target Neutral” project as a ’scheme’ isn’t lost on me. But then in the UK, which appears to be the only place this project is currently being tried for consumers, the word ’scheme’ may not have the same connotations as it does here in the States.
It’s not that I don’t applaud efforts to reduce global pollution. It’s just that the track record of oil companies doesn’t leave me feeling all warm and fuzzy about a program that isn’t asking for anything more than money from the public.
[tag]Target+Neutral, BP Oil, CO2, pollution, global warming, green energy[/tag]
One Response to “Paying For Your Pollution”
By Rifleman on Aug 29, 2006 | Reply
I don’t see much of a difference between “trusting” an Oil company as compared to trusting a government or an NGO of the UN. Seriously, the US government doesn’t have a very god track record on protecting the environment either. The most recent and glaring failure was demonstrated by the EPA’s mandatory use of MTBE as a gasoline additive. In the DFW area, MTBE was mandated even tough it had no effect of the very polution that had put the area out of compliance with the clean air act, i.e. Ozone. And then the EPA was phased out because it contributed to water polution, a problem that was known when they mandated it in the first place. Actually, the government is in a better position to do more damage to the environment, since there is no one to oversee the government and penalize them when they do something for mere political expediency, and the public has to pay for abuse from both entites. An example of this is when the billions of dollars from “the Windfall Profits tax” were not used to find new alternative fuels as was promised.