I Am Shocked, Shocked

Just found a really interesting article in today's Washington Post. Talking about the market for Carbon offsets and how exactly it is that you're willing to pay and what exactly you're paying for, when you buy them.

Here are the opening three paragraphs that summarize what the article is going to be about:

Sites such as this one, offering absolution from the modern nag of climate guilt, have created a $55 million industry that once would have been beyond the greenest of imaginations. The market for "voluntary carbon offsets" now encompasses dozens of sellers and thousands of buyers, including individuals and corporations.

But in some cases, these customers may be buying good feelings and little else.

A closer look reveals an unregulated market in which some improvements bought by customers are only estimated, extrapolated, hoped-for or nil. Some offsets support projects that would have gone forward anyway. Others deliver results difficult to measure.

It's a question that I've been wondering about for myself for awhile. For instance, what exactly do you get when you buy an offset? How is it that by spending more money, you're able to cancel out your own problems? Isn't this just shifting the blame for carbon problems that lead to "man-made" global warming?

But in a way, as a capitalist, I have to like the idea of carbon offsets. I mean, I love futures markets for commodities, I love the stock market and what it does, what's wrong with carbon trading? I think I, and other free-marketers would love to see an actual commodity develop that could be reliable traded back and forth. That would solve my problems.

But how do you create this commodity? Who's going to oversee it? The article asks that question.

But it also asks some of these other questions:

Some of the money paid for these certificates stays with the offset vendor or with a middleman. The rest usually winds up with the energy project's builder or the utility that buys its electricity. In some cases, this can amount to something like a donation to a for-profit company: American Electric Power, which sold an undisclosed amount of certificates from wind farms last year, earned more than $1 billion in profit.

Some environmentalists balk at this. If the certificate is bought only after the energy is produced, they wonder, how can an offset vendor know the energy wouldn't have been produced anyway?

Now, I don't have a problem with that at all. In fact, if a company is doing something the right way, and their service has value, then they should profit. That's the way the economy works. That's the way the system works.

Just something I've been thinking about a lot. I'd like to see it develop, but I'd like to see a whole heck of a lot less governmental subsidies in general. Lose the ones for oil too while we're at it. I'm willing to pay a little more for wind power.

And if a hydrogen fuel cell car ever comes along, I'm buying it immediately ...