Look at Al’s Carbon Credits
Thursday, March 1st, 2007 9:26 pm by Neal(Hat tip: Gina Cobb)
The Australian Daily Sun’s Andrew Bolt writes, “any day now, global warming will change from the world’s biggest scare to the world’s biggest joke.”
After the revelations on Al Gore’s electricity-and-gas-gobbling McMansion in Nashville spoiled his brief Oscar honeymoon, team Gore went into spin-control mode explaining away the hypocrisy with fluorescent light bulbs, green power, and this.
And so we get to Gore’s final excuse — the get-out-of-jail card of so many of our warming prophets of doom, from Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery to that Jeremiah of the airport lounge, David Suzuki: Gore buys carbon offsets.
Well, there you go. End of story. Move along, nothing to see here. Right?
Not quite.
But there are at least four problems with such offsets, the first of which is very particular to Gore. And that is Gore buys his offsets through Generation Investment Management, whose chairman is . . . Al Gore.
What’s more, GIM’s business is not to itself remove carbon from the air, but, it says, to “buy high quality companies at attractive prices that will deliver superior long-term investment returns”.
Oh, and by the way, those companies have to be green. Some are even wind farms, although even they — don’t kid yourself — produce some greenhouse gasses.
So Gore isn’t so much buying offsets as investing in fashionable companies for profit. Lucky him. Rich him.
Now, that is what you call having your cake and eating it too.
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UPDATE:
03/02/2007 — “Best of the Web” author James Taranto noticed this as well. He also links to Al Gore’s carbon offset company, Generation Investment Management.