Green Guilt

Indulge Me: Market in “Green Guilt” Booming, If Nothing Else Is
Posted by Keith Johnson
Wall Street is tanking, home prices are flying south, and jobless claims are on the rise. Are there bulls anywhere? Sure there are—in the market for “green guilt.”
Early guilt markets (Wikipedia)
The Washington Post reports today on one of the few markets enjoying happy times, the market for voluntary “carbon offsets” that let people pay someone else to curb their emissions of greenhouse gases. The offset market, says the WaPo, is not only getting bigger, prices are going up:
In other words, when nearly everything seems to be selling for less, thousands of individuals and businesses are paying more for nothing, or at least nothing tangible.
Part of the reason, the WaPo says, is that the kind of people who have money to spend on “luxuries” like expatiating green guilt haven’t yet been slammed by the financial crisis. That’s true of high-profile green activists, too—actress Jamie Lee Curtis snagged one of the first five hydrogen-powered cars in Los Angeles, even though she admitted higher gasoline prices hadn’t dented her tax bracket or influenced her decision.
Odder is the continued enthusiasm for offsets when government watchdogs have been warning all year that it is sometimes a sketchy market. The Federal Trade Commission held hearings earlier this year to examine questionable advertising claims about carbon offsets. Last week, the General Accounting Office released a report criticizing “the limited assurance of credibility” in the voluntary market for offsets. The GAO report also questions how many projects would have been carried out anyway, regardless of the extra financing brought in by the offset market.
And that issue hounds more than just people trying to justify a guilt-free weekend in Vegas. At a time when the scope and seriousness of China’s push into clean energy is becoming apparent, for example, how much longer can reluctant European economies pretend they are underwriting China’s energy transformation and cleaning up the global environment?