Carbon Credits: For Liberals Who Don’t Want To Practice What They Preach

30 Mar, 2010 by John Hawkins

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Carbon credits have always been nothing more than an excuse for wealthy liberals to engage in hypocrisy.

You see, on the one hand, they’re demanding that everyone dramatically reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses that they’re putting out. However, in order to do that, most people would have to dramatically scale back their lifestyle.

For you little people, that might be okay, but for limousine liberals? They’re important, you see, and it’s not fair to ask them to live by the same standards they want to apply to everyone else.

For example, take Stone Gossard and the rest of Pearl Jam:

No offense to Mr. Jagger, but it’s never only rock ‘n’ roll.

It’s trucks and buses, freight being shipped. It’s air travel and hotel rooms. It’s electricity in the arenas. It’s fans driving to the show and back.

All that rocking and rolling can rack up some 5,400 metric tons of carbon-equivalent emissions.

And for Pearl Jam, it’s just bad business, and no way to treat the place its members call home.

So the band has partnered with the Cascade Land Conservancy (CLC) to mitigate carbon-equivalent emissions from its ongoing 2009 world tour.

Pearl Jam will donate $210,000 to plant 33 acres of native trees and plants in four Puget Sound communities: Seattle, Kirkland, Redmond and Kent.

The band hopes to make up for the environmental damage it does during its current world tour, which heads to the Midwest next month.

“We’re going to store carbon where it should be,” said Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard. “In our urban forests.”

…Microsoft should offset their carbons,” (Gossard) told me. “They benefit a great deal from Washington state, bring people here from all over the world, and is a perfect company to begin to look at its carbon footprint.”

Now, if Pearl Jam wants to plant some trees in Washington, that’s super, but, that doesn’t change the fact that they’re responsible for “5,400 metric tons of carbon-equivalent emissions” being spewed into the air on just this tour. Nor does it cover the rest of the metric tons of carbon they’ve been responsible for in their lives and will continue to be responsible for. How much carbon does the private jets they take spew out? How about the limos? What about the mansions they live in? How much carbon is produced putting out their albums? You can go on and on with this, but however you slice it, someone like Stone Gossard is going to be responsible for churning out as much greenhouse gas as 30-40 normal people, if not more, over the course of his lifetime.

If, like Stone Goddard, you think this is a big problem, then the obvious solution would seem to be to dramatically cut back. Forego the tour all together. Move to a smaller house. Live like someone from the middle-class, not like a rock star. Isn’t that what they want YOU to do? Cut back on your lifestyle. Buy an expensive electric car that doesn’t work as well as the one your already have. Spend days driving across country to see your relatives instead of flying there in a few hours.

But, if Stone Goddard and the rest of Pearl Jam aren’t willing to do it, they shouldn’t expect other people to do it — and they shouldn’t try to pretend that planting some trees somehow offsets their plush lifestyle.