This Is Why We are Doomed

There's a Gold Mine In Environmental Guilt
Carbon-Offset Sales Brisk Despite Financial Crisis

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 6, 2008; A01

This is strange territory. The Dow is down. Wall Street needs a bailout. But in the Washington area and across the country, there is still a bull market in environmental guilt. Sales of carbon offsets -- whose buyers pay hard cash to make amends for their sins against the climate -- are up. Still. In some cases, the prices have actually been climbing. . .

But there is also a cultural factor, the legacy of a complicated decade defined by a "green" awakening . . . many people have learned to pay to lessen their climate shame -- and, at least for now, they don't think of it as a luxury purchase.

"I was feeling really guilty because I was basically traveling to three continents in the last month: 'I've spent basically six days on an airplane. I've got to fix this,' " said Michael Sheets, 27, who lives in the District's Logan Circle neighborhood.

So a few days ago, Sheets paid $240 to a Silver Spring-based vendor, Carbonfund.org, choosing its offsets because they were more than $100 cheaper than a comparable package from another offset seller. He got back an e-mail saying that the 52,920 pounds of greenhouse-gas emissions attributable to him for the entire year . . . "I feel much better about it," said Sheets, human resources director for an online-education company in Northern Virginia. "I don't feel as guilty about flying to Vegas tomorrow for the weekend."

Find the whole, sad story at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/05/AR2008100502518.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Kent Comments:

This is why we are doomed.

It’s not terrorism. It’s not the economy. It’s the stupidity.

If people want to give away money rather randomly, that is fine. That they can be so easily convinced to give it away for this reason reveals an underlying ignorance - and some truly perverse stupidity - that will spell the end of western civilization.

Of course, many of those who push the “environmental” hysteria and it’s associated pseudo-guilt want just that - the destruction of western civilization. Anything as beneficial as western civilization (I know it’s not perfect, but it is so much better than so many alternatives) is bound to have enemies among those who hate humanity, as so many environmentalists do.

But the fact that there is a “bull market for environmental guilt” means that far too many people have accepted the faulty premises of environmentalism. That fact points to an underlying ignorance and stupidity that I think will make the survival of western civilization impossible.

This underlying problem seems to resist any educational remedy. Environmental stupidity has become a brand of unfalsifiable hypothesis, which shows just how far away from science it has moved. Yet it is rapidly becoming the orthodoxy in the ‘education’ establishment and the domain of politics.

At this point these ‘carbon offsets’ are just the pointless foolishness of many willing victims. You will know the end is near when these foolish victims add power to their own personal foolishness and require us all to become practicing fools. Without some rather drastic changes and decisive action, that time seems close at hand.

That is why we are all doomed.