The thing that bugs me isn’t that his dropped them because he was worried customers would just take it as a cost, and not really do anything about their carbon footprints, but that that company (and presumably others) used schemes in the third/developing world to do so.

What is wrong with this country? We have oodles of space where trees can be planted. If you take a look at the moors, our mountainous areas, Scotland, islands off our coast, these all have places to plant trees. What about other schemes like providing literature to small/medium businesses on how they can reduce their carbon use? I heard a few weeks back of a company that produces no waste because the owner recycled everything, and in the course of that got fined by the local council because they thought he was doing something wrong (read: illegal?).

Perhaps this is the problem with carbon offsetting. We get used to dumping our problems on the third/developing world, so we do the same with our carbon problems. Supposedly the market for carbon in Europe is worth £81Bn – I wonder how much of that the third/developing world actually sees?

If I could get the funding I’d create a company to do just that, buy land here in the UK and plant trees, or plant trees on government (unused) land. No doubt our lovely government would consider that a waste. Anything less than a few billion is useless, after all. If they can afford £1.5 Trillion (yes, that’s a ‘t’) for bank bailouts and the economic mess, surely they can afford a few Billion to plant trees?

Then I read this Times article and it says that every two google searches is effectively using the same amount of energy as it takes the boil a kettle. Ouch! I do a -lot- of searching, I like to read and I like to know things, so pretty much I search about forty or fifty times a day I think.

This being said though, I heard that Google is looking at ways of cutting that all down. Mainly by moving their server farms onto offshore platforms where the energy can be generated by wave/solar/wind power. Good idea!

I don’t run a car though, so my internet usage is offset by that, so thankfully I’m not a great fat carbon hog.