So all three presidential candidates are now in favor of a cap & trade policy (some differences between them) for carbon emissions, it might actually happen someday.
It got me thinking… in such a system Environmental groups could buy carbon credits, and then just not use them. A fairly direct way to turn dollars into clean air, and it’d have a side-effect of making the remaining credits more costly, and therefore make it more costly to pollute.
You naively assume that environmentalists are motivated by a desire for a cleaner environment. If that were true, people like Al Gore would quit jetting around the globe in private jets, spewing more carbon in a single trip than my SUV does in probably its entire service life. Don’t ever expect these hypocrites to put their own money where their mouths are.
I’ll act like global warning is an emergency when the people who tell me it is, start acting like it is.
Environmentalists, by definition, are people who are concerned about the environment. Whether Al Gore is actually an environmentalist or not doesn’t matter. There are millions of people out there who are. Every person who chooses to recycle instead of throwing something away, shuts off a light they’re not using at work, or chooses to buy products made in an eco-friendly way over an option that’s not is an environmentalist.
This is an opportunity for a brand new type of charity that is focused on this mechanism of reducing pollution to form. Then anyone who donates to a charity for environmental reasons has another option. A million people donating $5 goes a lot further than one person donating a million. There are a bunch of charities based around a clean world, and regular people DO put their money where their mouth is and donate to them.