Buy your way green
March 12th, 2008 | by Paul |
Meet the eco-chocolate.
Not only is it yummy and have neat tips on the wrapper, but it can assuage your environmental guilt. Why? This choco-tastic candystuff - brought to you by TerraPass, Whole Foods Market and Bloomsberry and Co. - comes with a verified TerraPass carbon offset for the average human’s daily carbon footprint.
The carbon footprint measures how much greenhouse gas a person or industry produces, for those of you who haven’t left the house since 2004.
Carbon offsets are when companies, or in this case chocolate lovers, by the right to pollute. Basically, other companies either cut their carbon footprint or pledge to cut their carbon footprint and they get a credit for that. Then, they sell off the right to pollute to another company, but that company has to pledge to cut down in a couple years.
So Bob’s Ferrous Metallurgy finds some way to reduce the amount of CO2 it puts off by 100,000 pounds. Fred’s Family Meatpacking buys from Bob the right to put off 100,000 pounds of CO2 while Fred is working on ways he could put off less CO2. In the long run, the net CO2 is reduced, Bob and Fred didn’t go broke looking for eco-friendliness and the Chicago Climate Exchange is in the picture somehow.
(The aforementioned neat tips)
I want to know what you, my loyal reader, thinks of carbon offsets. I’ve heard it’s genius; I’ve heard it’s hooey. I would look into the matter more, but it’s finals week. You’re lucky I’m blogging at all.
If what they say happens is actually what happens, I guess I can see the value of industrial carbon offsets. But, on the individual level, it’s not like the eco-friendly projects are going to stop if you don’t buy the eco-chocolate bar. I mean, chocolate is good and all, but come on.