A Better Way to Offset Your Carbon Footprint
If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know I've written a lot about raising the price of gas to help offset all the negative externalities that come from consuming it. More and more people are becoming aware of a thing called Terrapass, where you pay for credits to offset the carbon emissions your car is belching into the world. Basically, your car pollutes the earth, but the money you spend on a Terrapass funds clean energy projects that help make up for that pollution.
I've found what I think is a better offset: carbonfund.org. Not only is the equivalent credit 50% less (in the case of our family's car and the type of mileage we put on it, $20 per year instead of $40 per year), but the donation is tax-deductible. You can even select the type of offset project you want your money to go towards: renewable, efficiency, or reforestation. Carbonfund.org also has a "zero carbon" option where $99 per year offsets everything in your life, not just your driving.
But there's an even better way to offset the negative effects of CO2 emissions, and that's with a carbon tax. I know, a Republican advocating a tax, look at me. But bear with me here. A tax on something does two things for you: the higher price causes people to consume less of it, and the revenue you raise gives you money you can do something with.
In the case of carbon, no tax means people are getting a free ride, only everyone else and Mother Nature are paying for it. Tack the tax on and people will do less of the things that incur the tax, and the tax revenues can be used on clean energy projects.
I've heard a lot of talk lately about food and the environment, that if you eat fruit that's from far away (and a lot of the good fruit we eat in this country is from really far away), that's bad because a lot of pollution happened in getting that piece of fruit from where it was grown to where you bought it. The problem here isn't that it's inherently better to eat locally-grown food, but that the price of transporting food is artificially low. If you get the price right on that, it doesn't matter how far your fruit had to travel to get to you, because the different prices account for the environmental impact and profit-taking that happened along the way.
The fact that you can voluntarily zero out your carbon footprint is great. But the fact that it has to be voluntarily isn't. If you want to buy your produce in such a way that it didn't have to travel so far, more power to you. But if you like bananas from Ecuador and oranges from Florida and tomatoes from New Jersey, the price of getting them to you shouldn't be skewed to the point that we're all worse off than if you'd planted a garden in your own backyard.
Somewhere between the smugness of the tree huggers and the oblivion of the SUV drivers, there's got to be a place to rationally calculate what sort of tax it would take to get this right for both sides, so that the tree huggers get the zeroed-out carbon footprint they're fighting for and the SUV drivers can pay the right price to exercise their preference for big cars. Does anybody out there have the economic acumen and political savvy to make that happen?
I've found what I think is a better offset: carbonfund.org. Not only is the equivalent credit 50% less (in the case of our family's car and the type of mileage we put on it, $20 per year instead of $40 per year), but the donation is tax-deductible. You can even select the type of offset project you want your money to go towards: renewable, efficiency, or reforestation. Carbonfund.org also has a "zero carbon" option where $99 per year offsets everything in your life, not just your driving.
But there's an even better way to offset the negative effects of CO2 emissions, and that's with a carbon tax. I know, a Republican advocating a tax, look at me. But bear with me here. A tax on something does two things for you: the higher price causes people to consume less of it, and the revenue you raise gives you money you can do something with.
In the case of carbon, no tax means people are getting a free ride, only everyone else and Mother Nature are paying for it. Tack the tax on and people will do less of the things that incur the tax, and the tax revenues can be used on clean energy projects.
I've heard a lot of talk lately about food and the environment, that if you eat fruit that's from far away (and a lot of the good fruit we eat in this country is from really far away), that's bad because a lot of pollution happened in getting that piece of fruit from where it was grown to where you bought it. The problem here isn't that it's inherently better to eat locally-grown food, but that the price of transporting food is artificially low. If you get the price right on that, it doesn't matter how far your fruit had to travel to get to you, because the different prices account for the environmental impact and profit-taking that happened along the way.
The fact that you can voluntarily zero out your carbon footprint is great. But the fact that it has to be voluntarily isn't. If you want to buy your produce in such a way that it didn't have to travel so far, more power to you. But if you like bananas from Ecuador and oranges from Florida and tomatoes from New Jersey, the price of getting them to you shouldn't be skewed to the point that we're all worse off than if you'd planted a garden in your own backyard.
Somewhere between the smugness of the tree huggers and the oblivion of the SUV drivers, there's got to be a place to rationally calculate what sort of tax it would take to get this right for both sides, so that the tree huggers get the zeroed-out carbon footprint they're fighting for and the SUV drivers can pay the right price to exercise their preference for big cars. Does anybody out there have the economic acumen and political savvy to make that happen?
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