"We Don't Buy Adultery Offsets"

In Prosem today, when carbon offsets came up, I chimed in, "Yeah, we don't buy adultery offsets," and I mentioned that it's just a weird concept because of the implications. It doesn't make sense. Regardless, I, too, used to be a naïve supporter of this ridiculous notion, feeling guilty about my plane flight to Brasil three and a quarter years ago, knowing that I still needed to plant approximately 10 trees to make up for my carbon contribution or pay someone else to do it. I've since abandoned my support for the concept, and so have others, others who thought up the adultery offset idea for me:

Peter Schweizer's USA Today op-ed, "Offset Away Our Guilt: If we can buy 'carbon offsets' for our environmental missteps, why not for our others sins?"

Peter Schweizer's NPR interview

In trying to dig up (on google) the earliest comparisons of carbon offsets to adultery offsets, to try to figure out when I first heard the idea from my boyfriend, I not only found an interesting statement ("Critics of carbon offsets have compared them to the medieval sale of indulgences...Trouble is, the adultery is still committed, and the carbon is still pumped into the atmosphere. The only tangible benefit is that the sinner feels good about it.") at this Canadian Buddhist monk's blog (not bad of its own accord) but also this Media Matters article about a Fox News commentator who was making comparisons, along with a guest (also backed by a multi-million dollar corporation with definite interests in not changing the status quo on what might be causing climate change), of the two kinds of offsets as early as July 2007, which either means that Schweitzer snagged/nabbed the idea from the guest, Chris Horner, or was simply thinking along the lines of those critics who found an easy comparison to that severely out-dated commodity, indulgences.

The funny thing, of course, though certainly not at all out of character, is that the Fox News commentator bashed Al Gore for frequently buying offsets but abstained from criticizing his own boss, Rupert Murdoch, for intending to make Fox News Corporation "carbon neutral" by 2010--so it's all about whatever sells, right?, not about reality, both in Fox News Land and in Carbon Offset Land?

Incidentally...On the NPR website, I discovered an appalling thing. You can listen to just about any recorded NPR moment for free, straight from your computer, just as you could from your car or your alarm-radio or your living room stereo. But suppose you are deaf. You'd also like the benefit of accessing NPR's wealth of data, thanks to the feats of the digital age. You go to the NPR website and find news articles and talks you would like to be privy to. You click on the teeny black print, "Transcript," to the right. Then you suddenly discover that you must either choose to pay $3.95 for every story that interests you or pay for a $12.95 monthly subscription to their transcript services. How pathetic and cruel is that? If you can hear, NPR is free, but if you're deaf and have to pay extra expenses for all kinds of things as it is, NPR costs a fortune. Thanks, NPR, for making program-listeners automatically implicated in such injustices. I know that at least for election speeches, CNN will also provide transcripts of talks that are mentioned in articles on their website--free. NPR certainly accrues costs to pay for transcribers, but what about their web developers, their web-audio service providers, their broadcasting crews? They don't pass those costs along to radio listeners or web listeners. They use advertising. Hence, to force such hefty costs on deaf people ($155.40 a year) is ridiculously unfair, and I can't imagine any decent justification for their behavior. Obvious conclusion? NPR should offer transcripts freely just as they do audio.