Having written a number of blog entries about carbon offsetting around a year ago, I’ve been watching the mounting debate over them with some interest. While I appreciate much of what George Monbiot has to say, I wasn’t impressed with his claim that carbon offsets are ‘the new indulgences.’ The emotive rhetoric masked a real issue of how we can ensure that measures to combat climate change are fair to the poor, and don’t simply let the rich buy our way out of obligations.

Today I spotted a story on the BBC website about the testimony of Jutta Kill (of the Forests and the European Union Resource Network) before a committee of British MPs investigating carbon offsets.

The first thing that struck me was that while the story is labelled as being about offsets in general, it appears the testimony was directed purely at those which are based on planting trees. Not all offset schemes work that way, and those we chose to support are focussed on building an infrastructure, through investment in clean energy, to help reduce future emissions.

Similarly, not all such schemes are selling themselves as a complete solution to global warming. There are those who would like to do themselves out of a job, by showing us how much carbon we’re generating and so focus our minds on reducing that. And for those of us who are in a life situation where we’re unlikely to ever be able to shake the transatlantic flying habit, it’s good to know that we can at least offer something back to the environment.

Tags: Carbon Offsetting, George Monbiot, FERN

Slacktivist has a link to, and some salient commentary on the astonishing speech by House Minority leader John Boehner, in which he argued that the current ‘war on terror’ began with the US Embassy hostage taking in Iran in 1979. It’s a fairly obvious part of the ongoing propaganda build up that seems increasingly directed towards military action by the USA against Iran.

But one thing Boehner opens himself up to is an immediate counterpoint that if we’re going to trace the conflict back to 1979, perhaps we could go one step further and look back to 1953 when the United States and the United Kingdom acted to stop the spread of democracy around the world with Operation Ajax.

I’m not sure I want to engage ideologues like Boehner in that sort of tit-for-tat debate. The entire premise of their approach is fundamentally flawed. But since the US media and the public consciousness have forgotten any vague awareness it once had of events in Iran back in the early 50s, it is worth bringing up the fact that the hostage crisis didn’t emerge from a vacuum any more than the World Trade Center attacks and Iraq War.

Tags: John Boehner, Operation Ajax, War On Terror, Mohammed Mosadegh, The Other Ajax