Carbon Credits: A Sucker Born Every Minute

Filed in archive Legislation/Environment News , News , Rants on June 4, 2007

Roden over at IfEnergy brought up the fact that his friend is into carbon credits as an investment, and is doing quite well at it. I know Al Gore would be proud. I kind of chuckled to myself knowing that there are plenty of suckers people more than willing to plop their money down for something so foolish as carbon credits.

You don't really think about it until you are faced with it, but it's pretty wide-spread; while driving to the desert one day I noticed an SUV loaded with carbon emitting engines being dragged behind it which had a TerraPass sticker on it. Being a curious type that I am I wanted to know what a TerraPass was all about, so I did some digging when I got home.

If you go to http://terrapass.com you'll find that you can enter your car and mileage and they'll happily suggest a plan that's right for you. Or them, depending on how you look at it. So I started entering my car info and they didn't have my truck listed, so I faked it. For the meager price of .22 cents per day i can be almost carbon neutral.

Man! What a deal! They can make me feel good about my carbon footprint!

What's that? You're skeptical? How dare you question something that's good for the global warming problem!

Seriously, if you take a closer look at terrapass' "partners", (who you'll find on this page, http://www.terrapass.com/about/partners.html, you'll realize that all you're doing is giving THEM money to invest, and THEY OWN THE INVESTMENT.

That's right! The money you give them to invest is a donation for their investment into areas that you can invest in yourself and actually own that investment.

But no, with terrapass, THEY own the investment, and YOU get a sticker. They own stock in Capricorn Management that YOU paid for. You don't own it, or see any benefit from it, they do. You get a sticker.

See this on Cap's website:
The following is a snapshot of our primary asset classes:

Cash and Equivalents
Capricorn's strategy is to seek stable income with little or no risk to principal. We invest domestically and internationally in a variety of securities and currencies.

http://www.capricornllc.com/investment_activities/index.php

A variety of securities and currencies??? I can't think of anything greener, can you??