Some interesting comments around the blogs. John Chilton on buying green power :
Buying “green power” is just rearranging the deck chairs, buying power that would have been in the energy mix anyway. It’s like buying the green M&M’s when no one else cares what the color of their M&M’s are.
The Economist blog on why offsets don’t in fact offset as much as you might think :
MANY readers profess puzzlement as to how carbon offsets could fail to reduce one’s carbon footprint. The answer is that they probably do reduce one’s carbon footprint, but by nowhere near the one-for-one ration that seems to be implied by the extraordinarily low price of carbon offsets.
And Glenn Whitman on a larger philosophic question :
It seems to me that global warming alarmists like Al Gore are playing both sides of the fence. On global warming’s existence, they emphasize the importance of scientific consensus and characterize the skeptical minority as equivalent to Holocaust deniers. But when it comes to global warming’s severity, they suddenly reject the scientific consensus and embrace a minority opinion.
Quite, which is it? Does the IPCC process show that climate change is a reality? If so, how can anyone then turn around and say that the IPCC report must be dismissed as not showing us the reality of climate change? One or the other, surely? If we rely upon that IPCC statement that sea level will rise by 17cm (or 40 cm, there’s several numbers to choose from) then how can we then insist that it will be 12 meters?