Intel in bed with big polluters on carbon offsets
It's no secret that big polluting companies are going all out to try and destroy the chance of the US congress passing meaningful global warming legislation with significant emissions reduction targets. On big loop hole is the option of "offsetting" reductions abroad. The flawed nature of large scale carbon offsets has been exposed many times, recently by a Greenpeace investigation into offsets related to rainforest projects.
Big polluters love them because it's a cheap way of passing off their responsibility to someone else, somewhere else. Even though big polluters have already got the current draft US legislation filled with far too many loopholes, last week they wrote a letter asking for even more offsets, otherwise it would mean slightly lower multimillion profit margins. What was surprising was that joining such huge polluters such as Duke Energy, Dominion, Exelon and American Electric Power was Intel.
Yep Intel, one of the foundations of the IT industry that claims in can cut emissions by 15 percent by 2020 and generate billion of dollars of efficiency saving as well. Now Intel is firmly siding with the regressive, dirty companies and adding it's name to calls for US legislators to make even less effort to cut emissions in the US.
The full text of the letter and entertaining translation is in on our US blog but here's a flavour:
Re: The Importance of International Offsets for U.S. Climate Change Mitigation Efforts
Dear Senator Kerry, Senator Graham, and Senator Lieberman:
We, the undersigned, are companies that employ hundreds of thousands of American workers, and serve hundreds of millions of American consumers. We expect that our companies would be affected significantly by any greenhouse gas regulatory program. We write today to communicate our firm belief that in order for any such program to be both environmentally effective and economically sound it should be market-based and incorporate both domestic and international offsets. To this end, we are concerned about the further restrictions on use of international offset credits in S. 1733, reported last week by the Environment and Public Works Committee.
TRANSLATION: We are some of the biggest, richest polluters in the world and we have a lot invested in dirty business. If you pass climate legislation without huge loopholes for us, we’re going to be very upset. One of the most important loopholes we want are carbon offsets – cheap vouchers that allow us to side-step cutting our pollution with the rationale that someone else, somewhere else, will cut pollution instead. Sure, the legislation in Congress already has massive subsidies for us and billions of tons of offsets in it, but we are still not happy. We always want more.
When IT companies need to be championing a strong deal in Copenhagen Intel is pushing in the wrong direction. It certainly won't help Intel's score in our Cool IT Challenge. Maybe Intel deserves a new slogan "Intel is working on the technologies of the future today" is more like "Intel is promoting excuses at the expense of the future today"
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