Articles by Adam Stein

Planktos may be a bad idea, but innovation is good

The green blogosphere generally reacted with chuckles or consternation to Planktos' announced plans to dump tons of iron into the ocean to, you know, see what happens. Gar Lipow took the article as another excuse to bash carbon offsets.

To follow the logic, you first have to know why anyone would want to dump several tons of iron into the sea. Planktos hopes to demonstrate that seeding the oceans with certain nutrients is a credible way to stimulate plankton blooms. It further hopes to demonstrate that these blooms are a credible way to sequester atmospheric carbon. Carbon markets provide the incentive for this quixotic undertaking. If the experiment is successful -- a big if -- Planktos could one day tap into the many billions of dollars available for carbon reduction projects.

Why are environmental activists so clueless at marketing climate change solutions?

Virgin Blue, the Australian extension of Richard Branson's airline empire, recently launched a program to allow passengers to purchase carbon offsets when they book a flight.

That's nice. But what struck me was this quote from Greenpeace's energy campaigner, Ben Pearson:

Virgin should not be criticized out of hand for this scheme, but it promotes the idea that dealing with climate change is easy and cheap rather than being about the difficult task of changing consumer behavior, government policy and investment.

Carbon offsets make for strange bedfellows

I sometimes joke that the one environmental topic that unites the far right and far left is a distate for carbon offsets. This, I should stress, is a joke -- overly broad, unfairly general, etc., etc.* But it is the case that the topic of carbon offsets occasionally makes for strange bedfellows.

The fake controversy over Al Gore's carbon footprint is a case in point. TerraPass recently had the pleasure of being featured on Glenn Beck's CNN program (Glenn Beck of Al Gore = Hitler fame).** We were declared a crock by Sean Hannity, and we were denounced by none other than Rush Limbaugh.

Environmentalism’s confusing accounting

The L.A. Times published an interesting if somewhat odd piece in last week's magazine about efforts to coax the business community into loving the environment by assigning a dollar value to our natural resources, or "ecosystem services."

So, for example, we learn that dung beetles provide $380 million of waste management services to the U.S. cattle industry. One mile of coastal wetland provides $2.4 million of storm protection. A nice fern is worth $4, or you can get 3 for $9.99.

I made up the last one.

The odd part of the article is that it wraps together these efforts to place a concrete value on natural resources with a very different phenomenon: the use of pollution markets to curtail environmentally damaging activities.