BBC World News reported this week that Costa Rica was close to becoming the first country to be carbon neutral? What do people think about a country becoming carbon neutral? Does everyone know what that means?
While I think it would be near impossible for the U.S. to be carbon neutral, I think that different municipalities even cities should try to be carbon neutral...
Food for thought.
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If the world has any intentions of ever becoming carbon neutral, with a billion trees like Costa Rica need to be significantly carbon negative. However, they are too busy cutting down the rain forest.
I believe the UW Campus has aspirations of becoming carbon neutral at some point. I think it's kind of a silly goal to just focus energy on carbon. What are they going to do, ban me from exhaling? Instead, new buildings should be built with green roofs, excess pavement should be replaced with grass, buildings should be constructed/remodeled to be energy efficient, and tax credits should be available for solar power.
The fact is, the technology isn't there yet for a city to be carbon neutral. If cities do strive for that, the way they would do it is by sending factories, highways, or other polluting things to nearby cities, in other words, they would just be covering up all of their dirty spots. It's like of like when I have company over to my apartment, I just cram all of my junk in the closet so that on the surface, everything looks clean.
We need to recognize that this is a global economy, so even if my little city is "carbon neutral", many of the things that I use/buy every day come from factories in China that do pollute. If I ignore that and wrongly proclaim myself to be carbon neutral, I'm just using statistics to lie to myself for the sake of marketing--and of course, that kind of thing happens all the time in the real world.
Thus, no city/municipality can ever be declared carbon neutral, since there is no way to keep track of all that. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be clean and energy efficient. It just means we should do it because it's the right thing to do, not to get some stupid title that we can brag to everyone else about.
Who cares? Over 99% of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere annually comes from natural sources (rocks, sedimentary deposits, ocean fauna, etc. etc.) - the great myth of anthropogenic global warming is just another generational fear mongering tactic used by those with an agenda to set (anyone remember that whole global cooling scare throughout the late 60's/early 70s? Whatever happened to that ...).
Is the earth getting warmer? Yes, climatological evidence suggests it is. But the earth warms and cools over the course of decades for a plethora of unknown reasons - does anyone actually think we'll be able to predict what the global temperature is in 100 years, as per Al Gore's theory, when we can't even accurately predict next week's weather? For that matter, who's to say yesterday's temperature was the "right" one?
Humans could never, even if we tried, significantly impact the global environment such that we would doom ourselves to an environmental apocalypse. Certainly, the carbon emission element of the debate has been settled: our contribution has been negligible, at best, and will continue to be.
We shouldn't be crafting multi-billion dollar policies, money that, remember, comes from the taxpayers, to remedy environmental problems that don't exist. Don't buy into Al Gore's hysteria, or the IPCC's, or any other eco-group trying to set an agenda to pump more money out of people. Be sensible and use common sense when examining issues like this.
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