Stupid Stickers

2009.05.27   prev     next

On the way to my son’s soccer practice, I noticed a car in front of me with a sticker on the back that said, “This car’s CO₂ offset by TerraPass.” Hmm, that’s interesting, I thought. What could “TerraPass” be? Some special new device that captures CO₂ before it escapes the car’s exhaust system into the outside air? Or maybe something that causes the engine to emit another gas in addition to CO₂ — a gas that somehow negates the greenhouse effect that otherwise would be caused by the CO₂? Hey, maybe it’s a mechanism that chills the exhaust, so that whatever small amount of global warming is caused by this car’s exhaust, is actually directly offset (temperature-wise) by using some of the engine’s energy to refrigerate the exhaust gasses?

Really curious by then, I looked it up on the internet. And guess what. It’s nothing but a sticker! That’s right, it was just an ordinary car, like the one I drive, but with a sticker on it that says something about “TerraPass.” What does that sticker do to change that car’s emissions and their effect on the environment? Nothing at all, of course.

What it actually means, if you study the slick TerraPass website, is that the person who has that sticker on their car has paid at least $29.75 to TerraPass to get the sticker, and at least some of that money has been contributed to advancing “green” technologies.

Of course, if you had a sticker on your car that said “I gave some part of $30 to the development of green technologies,” it wouldn’t sound anywhere near as impressive as claiming that the CO₂ emitted by your car is “offset.”

How do the people at TerraPass (or any people anywhere, for that matter) know what amount of monetary contribution to a green technology project is needed to offset the CO₂ emissions from a particular car? If it was your job to determine that amount, how would you go about it?

Even if all intelligent people agreed about the exact harm from a car’s worth of CO₂, the above question might be too ephemeral to calculate. So it’s only more elusive when they don’t agree. Some intelligent people think human-produced CO₂ is very harmful, some think it’s fairly harmful, some think it’s a little bit harmful, and others think it’s not harmful at all. Presumably, TerraPass shuns the not-harmful-at-all category, but what about the various degrees of harm claimed by those not in that category?

Remember all those different colors of “I care” loop ribbons that were so popular in the 1990s, and how you quietly wondered what the wearers of the ribbons had really done to solve the problems associated with those ribbons’ colors? Well, at least those ribbons weren’t making a claim more specific than “I donated something.” The highly specific claim on that TerraPass sticker I saw makes those care-ribbons look mild by comparison.