Carbon Credits - The Next Nigerian Bank Fraud
Current mood: cheerful
Category: News and Politics

Years ago, I asked my mother how it is that she could justify having a Diet Coke with a particularly fattening substance like her daily bag of Cheetos. She replied that having the Diet Coke - with zero calories - would cancel out her Cheetos. "Anything good cancels out the bad", she said with only the slightest bit of irony in her voice. Okay, I'm lying. My mother is usually so dripping in sarcasm that you have to towel yourself off after talking to her. Everyone knows that regardless of how many no calorie, low fat, low sodium, low anything foodstuffs you have, that if you wash that down with a six-pack of beer, you're not gaining anything - except a tummy.

With all the talk recently on global warming and Al Gore's "carbon offsets",  I have come to realize that my mother's jab at her own eating habits was in fact, pure genius. She will never have to work again. All she has to do is proclaim herself to be the sole purveyour and distributor of "caloric offsets". All you have to do is eat a fatty meal, from say McDonald's or The Sizzler, and then send money to my mother, whereupon she will use it to forgo her bag of Cheetos for say, a few stems of steamed broccoli. And in exchange, you will be absolved from all guilt from eating this large meal...and the 3500 calories you consumed will all but disappear without you feeling a thing! Forget lap-band surgery or that pesky gym membership. This truly is the way to go.

Now I just need to tell my mom about her idea and her new dietary habits.

So it goes with these "carbon offsets". Gore is "carbon neutral", but how? Basically he is paying off a company that (in typical politician form) he owns, in order that some trees can be planted in New Guinea (or wherever) that will "offset" the 50 tons of pollution that his Gulfstream V emits in a year.

Trees, yay! I love it. But honestly, does anyone really believe that this takes away the pollution already in the air due to his private jet? It's like Harry said to Sally, "it's already out there". There's no taking it back.

The Buddhists have the whole offset thing down pat. They came up with karma. However, they never said that every good thing that you do cancels out the bad, karma just means that the more good you do, the less time you have to spend paying for all the pain you've inflicted on the world.

We can all take a lesson from the Buddhists. And it would appear that Buddha himself would be wise to purchase some of my mom's caloric offsets.