Your tax dollars at work – in small amounts, anyway:

As part of the one-year-old “Green the Capitol” project, which aims at reducing the level of pollution created by members of Congress, the House purchased $89,000 in carbon offsets from the Chicago Climate Exchange, an offset brokerage company. The company then paid farms in the Midwest to take steps to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere…Carbon offsets were created to counterbalance the release of carbon into the air through practices such as planting trees, which feed off of carbon and produce oxygen, or employing companies to use non-carbon-producing fuels as energy. Last week Republican Reps. Joe Barton (R-Texas) and John Shimkus (R-Ill.) asked the GAO to look into “questionable purchases of carbon offsets” after recent media criticism of the venture revealed that while several farmers who had received money from the House purchase were actively sequestering carbon, they might not actually be using the money to further their carbon reduction efforts.

In the second season of The Wire, one of the main characters observed that America became great because we used to produce and make things (he used much more colorful language). But today, he lamented, we all just reach into the next guy’s pocket.

This is what the carbon credit scam is all about — it’s an attempt to get paid for doing something you’d do anyway. In this case, the beneficiaries are farmers, but major corporations are the ones pushing hardest for “Cap n’ Trade” legislation. General Electric — a major windmill producer which has the largest congressional lobbying budget of any company in the world – would receive a huge windfall if this so-called “market” is ever made mandatory or given legal legitimacy.