Carbon Credits Anyone?

A friend was kind enough to send me a couple seedlings to replace two of the tall pines I lost in the hurricane a couple years ago. Since everything grows like weeds here in East Podunk (it's the wet spot of Texas, after all), if they don't die in the first month, they'll be furiously sucking up carbon for the next forty years or so.

Since I have achieved a carbon-neutral lifestyle by other means, I have no need for the carbon offsets that these trees will provide. If anyone would like to buy the offsets, which I figure to be not less than five hundred pounds per year per tree, I will let the offsets go for £500 per tree per year. (The two trees should be worth about 20 minutes per year on a Gulfstream V, so if you know any earth-conscious celebs, please forward the link.)

I expect you may be wondering what "other means" I've found to become carbon-neutral. It's quite simple, really. As we all know, growing trees absorb gobs and gobs of carbon from the atmosphere, but that carbon is returned to the atmosphere when wood or wood products are burned or allowed to decay. However, when they're buried, that carbon is sequestered for all time.

So what I do is that when I shop, I always look for products with the most possible paper or cardboard packaging. And then, rather than recycle, which would just keep that carbon in circulation, I throw it away so that it can be hauled off to the local landfill where it will be buried and its carbon forever--or at least for the foreseeable future--removed from the atmosphere.

If we'd all just do little things like this to help the Earth, I'm sure the Global Warming catastrophe could be avoided. So please, do your part--buy my excess carbon credits and always buy the product with the most unnecessary packaging. The Earth and I are counting on you.