...how do your offsets go?

So, how would Vancouver Olympics offset their emmisions?  What programs are thet payin' into in order to buy offsets?

The Winter Games will be held in 2010, not 2012 as stated in the second paragraph of the story...

Winter sports highlight climate change.  And 2012 is a great time to measure any progress that might (probably won't) happen.  The situation will be dire by then.  Assuming no real mass production gets going, that's a fair assumption given the sorry state of progress so far.

Will chinese plugin hybrids be allowed in by then?  Detroit won't be offering appreciable numbers of them, if any.  Toyota and Honda are stalling too.

Could we have some proper repect for chinese and german efforts on this front?  Apparently not.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Why not just jack up the price of tickets?  They're already ridiculously high (and hard to get).  A few bucks to green the average flight via ticket price would never be noticed when compared to hotel rooms and travel.  But, yeah, WHO do you trust to offset millions of flights?  Sequesting bovine flatulance won't quite do it...

Of the many comments on BC enviro listserve's this one from Barry Saxifrage captures the greenwashing the best:

"This article doesn't break down "participant-carbon" from "spectator-carbon". I researched this a bit for Turino winter olympics (the best data i could find). In that case my best estimate was the "participants-carbon" was about 10% and "spectator-carbon" around 90%.

"The Turino olympics claimed carbon neutral but only offset the participant 10%. "F" for effort. "A" for lying.

"I've been telling people in van politics for years that the true climate-killing footprint of olympics is gigantic because of spectators. And this has been ignored in the past...but was unlikely to escape notice this time. The danger to Van is that it is seen as BEGGING and INVITING people to join in one of the biggest climate damaging event on the planet. The all-out push to get global elite to bring their fat wallets to Van puts a lie to "we aren't responsible for it" So much for "greenest city on earth" unless millions are set aside to fully deal with carbon on this scale.

"Plus what a good lesson to our kids: you only have to be responsible for 10% of the damage you cause and you are a climate hero. If actually taking responsibility for the impact of your actions is too hard, just ignore almost all of it.

"Snow job."

After reading the Canadian athlete's letter and the report from the David Suzuki Foundation it appears that VANOC has the will but needs a sponsor. Which corporate sponsor will step up and pay the $5 million to offset the remaining carbon footprint of the Vancouver Winter Olympics?

- Sustainable. Practical. Local. EcoNewMexico.com -