RE: Apples and oranges

The thing you seem to be missing is that there aren't an unlimited supply of these offsets to be bought. Someone has to sell them, and to do so they have to actively remove pollution from the air. Almost nobody is currently in the business of actively doing that, because there's no money in it.

Al Gore wouldn't achieve a damn thing by converting his house to be zero-gross emissions. Even if he did so and were praised to the skies over it (which certainly wouldn't happen), and even if it motivated lots of people to want to do the same, most couldn't afford it, and most simply wouldn't do it.

What's missing isn't someone acting as a model for zero-gross-emissions. What's missing is a system that gives people real incentive to change. The world emits some 24 billion tons of CO2 each year. The US about 20% of that. It's virtually impossible for there to be enough carbon-offset providers to compensate for that. But that's exactly what drives this system to work.

If we want to set a goal for, say, a 10% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2010, the government allocates 4.5 billion tons of carbon offsets for that year, which it sells at auction, much like a T-bill. Any carbon-offset providers add to that offsets that total whatever they're removing from the air. Anyone who emits more than they have offsets to cover faces fines much higher than the cost of an offset.

This creates a very strong incentive to meet that emissions goal. Shifting focus to an individual manufacturing business, the business owners will have some idea of what the offsets necessary to cover their plant's emissions will cost. This gives them a very concrete cost-benefit decision to make: pay for the offsets or find some way to by fewer offsets by reducing emissions. The fixed number of offsets in the auction mean that the price will be such that some businesses will find it makes business sense to convert their plant to emit less. Since there are 10% fewer offsets than there is pollution in the status quo, the price of those offsets is going to be quite high. Economic theory even suggests that they'll be exactly high enough to force a net 10% reduction in emissions - enough people will find ways to reduce their emissions that are less costly than the fines they'd face for emitting without offsets.

One rich guy that half the country hates converting his house to zero-gross-emissions isn't any kind of solution to the problem. But calling him a hypocrite when he's doing exactly what he proposes makes good political camouflage for big, polluting businesses that don't want to pay the high cost of their actions.