I’m doing my part.
When I talk to people about Carbon Planet, for many their initial response is “Well hooray, at last someone is doing something about global warming.” This reaction always makes me cringe.
“It’s not what we are doing,” I respond, “it’s what we are enabling you to do.”
“Oh but I’m doing my bit already,” many people reply. “I’m green! I recycle my rubbish, I use low energy lamps, I don’t drive a car, I don’t take plastic bags from the supermarket,” the list of people’s personal green credentials is seemingly endless. My inevitable reply is “No, you are not doing your bit, you’re doing a bit.”
The terrible truth is that, even if you do reduce your personal energy use, your very participation in our modern life is causing a huge amount of CO2 to be spewed forth into the Earth’s atmosphere.
We believe that the simplest way to effect real change is to offset your personal emissions directly by buying carbon credits, and then focus on saving the almost trivial amounts of energy you can by switching off that TV at the wall and adjusting the energy-saving settings on your computer. Some people have countered this argument by claiming that the world just doesn’t generate enough carbon credits for people to really offset their emissions, and you know - they are right; for now. But we believe that if everyone bought carbon credits, entrepreneurs the world over will find a way to generate them. Just look at the activity in India right now. Every man and their ox is scheming up ways to generate carbon credits, be it from growing trees, developing more efficient solar cells, burying industrial emissions or perfecting ways of making smokeless cooking fires.
In Australia there is a group called EnviroMission that is planning to build a 1 kilometer long ‘Solar Chimney’ to generate vast amounts of solar power. If all goes to plan the energy output from this tower will represent an annual saving of more than 900,000 tonnes of CO2 from entering the environment.
Plans like this give us all hope as it shows there are real, commercial ways of generating clean power on a massive scale.
You can offset your personal CO2 emissions right now. There is no need to wait for technology to be developed. And while turning down that extra plastic bag is certainly not a bad thing, it’s not making a jot of difference in the overall scheme of things.
Carbon Planet was set up to enable you to participate in the emerging global carbon economy. We give you a simple and direct way of offsetting 100% of your personal CO2 emissions. And that’s something that really does make a difference.
-DS
