Does buying carbon credits rectify the mortal sin of driving a Hummer? Bob and Mary Ann Windsor think so. The Windsors donated a miserly $49 to the nonprofit Carbon Fund to offset annual emissions of nine metric tons. The Windsors affix their carbon credit decal to their rear window like a Boy Scout badge, but, really, admits Bob, "It’s just, in crude terms, to shut people up.”
The Carbon Fund decal, however, didn’t deter a group of students from ridiculing the Windsor’s family vehicle. Not to worry, though; Mary Ann fired a searing retort back at the kids: "I have carbon credits so my car is actually cleaner than a Prius…You can pay for my gas or you can pay for my insurance; otherwise, you and your hippie parents can just be quiet!"
The Windsors take a lot of heat for driving the Hummer around their hippie-enclave hometown of Santa Fe, NM.
From the Santa Fe Reporter:
Drivers and pedestrians flip her off. Kids tell her she’s killing the planet. Grown-ups leave "nastygrams" on her windshield.
"I can’t understand how people here are so rude and so nasty about our (sport-utility vehicle)," she [Mary Ann] said.
Yet the hostility only emboldens her. Her Hummer, perhaps the world’s most reviled gas guzzler, gets 10 miles or less per gallon in the city. Perched high in her cab, Windsor feels safe driving in the snow with the children in her day-care business and armored against drunken drivers. Besides, she said, it’s no one’s business what she drives. "I don’t feel guilty at all," she said.
Bob Windsor believes in global warming, he said, but he’s “not sure how much man is the cause.” For her part, Mary Ann believes that global warming is “something the Democrats made up."
As for carbon credits, most scientists and environmentalists believe they’re bogus. Colin Beaven, a.k.a. No Impact Man, likened buying carbon credits to picking up a piece of trash at the beach after you’ve just tossed litter into the ocean. The off-set is nice, he says, but the garbage still exists. Beavan cautioned against allowing carbon offsets to become “some kind of salve for our conscience.”
The web site cheatneutral.com pokes fun at the concept of carbon offsets. It purports itself as a neutralizer for unfaithful partners, and gives cheaters the opportunity to pay monogamous people to remain faithful, thereby “neutral[izing] the pain and unhappy emotion and leav[ing] you with a clear conscience."
Photos via flickr by Eleventh Earl of Mar and David Blacknjr.
See also: SUVs Need a Warning Label
Introducing Hummer H8: The Earth F@#ker
Picking on Hummers
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I live in a southeastern rural area, and while I can choose to forgo the pump prices and travel by bicycle, my 89-year old neighbor cannot. She lives on a portion of what once was her family’s farm, surviving on a small fixed income, she cannot drive, has no family, and relies almost entirely on the county’s rural transit bus (a public service for those who can prove need) to get her into town for her various needs. Being a proud country girl, she almost always refuses offers of assistance from her neighbors. The explosive rise in fuel costs is stretching the meagerly-funded need-based transit system to the breaking point. It is questionable if the funding will be able to keep the service going, without cutting routes, capacity, etc. It will leave many in the lurch. It is pretty much an emergency for some our less-able citizens, and it could mean – for my neighbor, at least – she may be forced to sell her family homestead to move to a location where she could more easily reach a doctor, a grocery store, etc.
While I am often glad to see the rising gas prices make an impact on the choices we make in life, there are also the occasional unseen downsides.