Climate craziness

Only one shopping day left before Earth Day! If you haven't already heard, the hottest Earth Day fad is purchasing "carbon offsets." The way it works is simple. All you have to do is send some of your money to companies like Carbonfund.org who will use it to plant some trees in your honor. The trees will then filter CO₂ out of the air for years to come, helping you to approach the ideal environmental goal of becoming "carbon neutral."

For example, if you are going to take a round trip commercial flight from New York to Los Angeles to, for example, promote a documentary about global warming, the per-passenger carbon output of the flight would be 1,920 lbs.¹ (calculator here), or just shy of one ton. According to Carbonfund.org's donation page, a donation of $14.96 will take care of 6,000 lbs of CO₂, or roughly three round trips from LAX to NY La Guardia. Fifteen bucks seems like a pretty good deal for a green conscience. Too good to be true? Yep.

A single mature tree can absorb approximately 50 lbs. of carbon dioxide per year (source). If we assume trees cost $5 each², your donation would purchase three trees. These trees would, in turn, pull 150 lbs. of carbon dioxide from the air per year. Assuming these trees remained healthy, it would take about 40 years for these trees to eliminate the carbon dioxide produced by just three round trip flights from LA to NY.

In other words, you can achieve carbon neutrality, as long as you can afford to wait four decades.

If that's not good enough for you, then you might want to consider switching to gasoline with ethanol added to it, which results in a net reduction of carbon emissions by 30%. Of course, it takes "about 74 units of greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuel energy to produce 100 units of ethanol" (source) . In The Rough Guide to Climate Change, Robert Henson notes that growing enough corn to have an impact on greenhouse gas emissions would require "covering 15% of the world's agricultural land — a country the size of India — with nothing but corn, solely for ethanol." Considering that such a solution would lead to massive starvation around the planet, we probably need to keep looking for other alternatives.

By now you're probably starting to get the point; the reason I don't believe in man-made global warming is because the people who are predicting an impending apocalypse don't really believe what they are telling us. If they did, they wouldn't be bothering with carbon offsets that don't really accomplish anything or bio-fuels that will are more likely to lead to starvation than salvation. These supposed solutions may be powerful symbols for the global warming movement, but symbolism accomplishes very little when trying to stave off the supposedly cataclysmic effects of global warming.

Furthermore, as Greg Koukl noted today, there is "an inherent contradiction in the underlying convictions that drive annual "Earth Day" celebrations" since most environmental activists are also Darwinists. If we are all involved in a survival-of-the-fittest world, why should we waste valuable resources on conservation efforts? You'll have a hard time convincing me that the survival of our species is somehow directly linked to that of our polar bear neighbors to the North.

As Koukl points out, we all have an obligation to be good stewards of the planet. We should certainly adopt measures that save energy, reduce waste, and provide protection for God's creatures. However, our environmental stewardship should be rooted in reality and motivated by a worldview that revolves around Christ, not the sensationalism of Hollywood celebrities and over-hyped and radically expensive solutions.