An on-target skewering: of another of the great sins of the progressive mind--Carbon offsetting. It doesn't work, it doesn't make sense, and if you're not doing it, you haven't fulfilled the karma involved. In fact, you've just incurred more. (If karma is your thing.)
If you thought that the era of British bigwigs keeping Indians as personal servants came to an end with the fall of the Raj in 1947, then you must have had a rude awakening last week.
In a feature about carbon offsetting in The Times (London), it was revealed that the leader of the UK Conservative Party, David Cameron, offsets his carbon emissions by effectively keeping brown people in a state of bondage. Whenever he takes a flight to some foreign destination, Cameron donates to a carbon-offsetting company that encourages people in the developing world to ditch modern methods of farming in favour of using their more eco-friendly manpower to plough the land. So Cameron can fly around the world with a guilt-free conscience on the basis that, thousands of miles away, Indian villagers, bent over double, are working by hand rather than using machines that emit carbon.
Welcome to the era of eco-enslavement.
I've long thought the so called carbon-footprint offsets were just another way of doing whatever I want and shifting the burden for compensation to others. So, I feel the need to fly around the world in whatever luxury I would like to be accustomed to and to salve my eco-fevered brow, I hire a bunch of people not to use the conveniences which would make their labor easier.
When I first heard about Al Gore and his carbon-offsetting measures, I thought exactly these words--the new indentured servitude. Pay someone to suffer for my luxury. And so it continues, but all thinly veiled by the palliative fib that "I'm fixing up my own ecologically blunders." Hate to tell my good buddies this--but if you don't do it, you haven't fixed it.
Now, what I'd like to see is for every private jet trip or luxury-laden cruise undertaken by our so called eco-defenders between a year or two of using a manual lawnmower, turning the interior temp up to 85 or down to 60 for a few months--walking or bicycling to work for the length of time it would take to "pay for" say six-hundred pounds, or so, of jet fuel.
If you want to be eco-warriors, don't put your battles on the backs of the underprivileged--offset your own carbon footprint.
Hmm--reading this over, perhaps I should be more straightforward about what I think of this. I'll try harder next time.
