Fox news is not journalism

I almost didn't write this article because I didn't want to spread their misinformation any further. Fox news has a story about carbon footprint. While this article is from May 2006 the author of the aptly titled "Junk Science" column has an entire range of these. Up front I will admit that buried deep down in there, there is a nugget of truth. But you have to peel back layers of misleading statements to get there. Let's examine it.

"The notion of a personal 'carbon footprint' was created by global warming alarmists to foster a sense of individual accountability [for using fossil fuels]."
In the very first sentence we learn that getting people to take individual accountability for their actions is "alarmist." I argue that individual accountability is an ideal to be worked towards.

The meat of the article says that using carbon offsets to prevent 1 degree F of global warming (whatever that means) would cost between 7 and 38 trillion dollars. The author seems completely unconcerned with global warming (and scanning the other articles in this series confirms this) and does not suggest an alternative to offsets.

First, there are few things in this world that scale in a perfect line forever. If carbon offsets were the only tool that so-called alarmists had to fight global warming, there is no reason that it wouldn't follow a learning curve just like every other industry. The more that are made, and the greater the scale, the cheaper they become. At the point where 7 trillion dollars would have been spent on them, a carbon offset would be negligibly cheap. (As a side note, if we in the US spent the 1-2 trillion dollars of the war effort on carbon offsets we'd be quite far down that curve already).

Second, offsets are not the only tool available. They are not even a primary tool. Even if we agree that offsets are too expensive a tool to use on a large scale, all that means is that we need to use another tool. Let's try conservation for starters.

At the end of the article the author mentions in passing that, as a by-product of creating their web-based carbon footprint calculator, they calculated what it takes to prevent 1C of global warming (notice he switched to C suddenly, from F). "no manmade CO2 emissions for 120 years."

This type of discovery isn't the sort that is made as a by-product of a web page. I would be surprised if this sort of statement could be made without vast amounts of climate data and computing power.

Since that is clearly not an option, what can be done? In a fair and balanced treatment of the issue, this might be discussed. Instead, the carbon offsets industry is set-up and knocked down with misleading arguments and environmentalists labeled "alarmist."