Back in the days before the Internet (if you can imagine back that far), there were magazines. If you went into any half-way decent news stand, you could find me somewhere towards the back looking for the odd, the eccentric, the out-of-the-ordinary magazines (not the ones in plastic wrappers), many of which would flash across the newsstand like shooting stars, one issue and then they were gone forever. Finding a new one was like finding a new species, and if you liked it, hoping that it would not go extinct before you saw another issue.
My passion has carried over to the Internet, but the thrill of finding something new has attenuated. What can you do when even a few minutes of poking around brings you to "Cats that look like Hitler"?
But jaded though I may be, it’s still possible for someone to break through. And thus I present Portovert, "The first and only magazine for eco-savvy brides and grooms." As a guy, I appreciate the little throw-away outreach to men. On the armada of brides’ magazines at the usual newsstand, I can’t remember seeing a cover that had anything to do with men in any way, shape, or form—sort of the praying mantis approach, if you know what I mean.
I don’t even know if there is a printed copy of Portovert. The home page offers what could pass for the usual fare on any old bride’s magazine: a white-rose bouquet, a bride getting her veil adjusted, a honeymoon vacation give-away. The most intriguing element of the home page was a prominently featured section entitled, "Calculate your wedding emissions."
A quick click, however, takes you to a link for Native Energy, Bringing New Renewables to Market. The emissions in question are carbon, and Native Energy offers to make your wedding "carbon neutral." Using a handy calculator, you enter the number of people coming to your wedding, how far you think they’re driving or flying, how big the hall is, and poof, out pops the number of tons of carbon you need to offset. And for a fee based on the number of tons of CO2 your wedding will generate, NativeEnergy will provide those carbon offsets from a Native American windfarm or a methane project on a farm in Pennsylvania.
When you run across a choice site like this one, it’s always hard to know how seriously to take it. As part of the eye candy on its home page, Native Energy has the iconic view of Hurricane Katrina from space, labeled An Inconvenient Truth. What’s the connection with Al Gore’s Oscar-nominated documentary?
"With NativeEnergy, Participant Productions and Paramount Pictures Classics offset 100% of the CO2 pollution from air and ground travel, production energy use, and waste associated with the making of An Inconvenient Truth. Participant Productions and Paramount Pictures Classics made the film climate neutral and are helping build the Rosebud St. Francis wind farm in South Dakota and the Dovan family dairy farm methane renewable energy project in Pennsylvania."
So there you have it. Anyone who offsets CO2 for Al Gore has got to be the genuine article. As defenders of the market economy are fond of saying, the market works in mysterious ways, and this web site is one of those mysteries.
Scientists tell us that we have to make huge cuts in our total carbon output if we are going to stabilize the climate. In the best of all possible worlds, I suppose we could be building windmills and methane digesters and planting trees at such a clip that we offset the amount of carbon we were producing, at least for a little while. But without reducing the demand for carbon-generating activities, in the end no matter how ingenious we are, we will run out of potential offsetting activities.
So why not start reducing demand for oil right now? That’s what’s missing in the Portovert/NativeEnergy approach. On NativeEnergy’s home page, there is a prominent button for something called CoolDrive.org. On the CoolDrive page, we find a picture of a cow mouthing this slogan: "You don’t need to stop driving to help fight global warming." Offsetting is better than nothing, but I’d rather see our cities built so that we didn’t have to drive at all, regardless of how many windmills get built.
Cross-posted from Post Carbon Institute