Creating a market

Some days I wonder harder than others if perhaps I have gone insane. Driving home yesterday in the usual bumper to bumper, I heard an interview that was so full of paradox I felt my head would implode. Driving home with the hundreds and thousands of other drivers all wanting to get home as fast as humanly possible. Driving home not as fast as humanly possible, because there are hundreds of thousands of other people trying to do the same thing. Driving home, in my car, because there is no alternative to get me from home to work. Driving home, because it would take me approximately 3 hours EACH WAY to use public transport; adding 4 hours onto my working day.

So here we all are driving, our fossil fuel guzzling, air polluting machines that cause death and carnage and get us to places more slowly than anyone would like, and I hear this “hard hitting current affairs” piece on the radio. They were interviewing some CEO's of carbon credit companies. The big issue, apparently, is that there is a lack of standard auditing procedures for said carbon credit companies. Consumer organisations are up in arms: How does anyone know that they've done what they've said they would do? Apparently it is up to the government or some accreditation board to ensure that these companies are doing what they said they would do. There is accreditation for such activities apparently, only it isn’t standardised. Apparently people (and seems a lot of people) are forking over money to unaccredited companies and there is a concern that they might not get what they paid for? The big problem according to the CEO's of said companies is that other companies are unaccredited?

Umm hello?

The problem is that people are TRYING TO PAY PAYING SOMEONE ELSE TO DO THE HARD WORK. So it's okay to use plastic bags with abandon, driven 8 cylinder car, spend $4,000 on a pair of jeans sewn together by a 5 year old, if I pay someone else to undo all the nasty things I did?

Isn't that like deliberately hurting someone over and over then saying sorry every time and exepcting all the hurt feelings to just go away?

I was incredulous that these CEO's were talking about the new pioneering market and how it was important to give consumers good value for money.

Hey? It's a market? In what, exactly? Consumer? Consuming what? I think the consumers have all consumed quite enough, thank you, it's how we got ourselves to this ridiculous point in the first place.

Now we are going to buy our way out of it?

When I think about it, aren't they getting exactly what they paid for? A guilt-free approach to consumerism? Aren't they looking to PAY SOMEONE ELSE TO FIX THE PROBLEM? Does someone who buys designer clothes, drive a 4WD, take regular overseas trips for fun, actually care if the money they give for carbon credits actually does what they are paying for? Nothing else in their lives is value for money, should this be any different?

There's a problem with the environment, so to fix the problem people are going to SPEND their way out of it? And they are spending money, paying a company to plant trees?

What really amazed me was the people at these companies talking about the emerging 'market' of carbon trading. Let's be serious folks, they are talking about planting trees. That's not a market, that's fucking gardening. There is no consumer DEMAND for tree planting. There is no market for planting trees. We can't water our own gardens when we need to and we are paying someone else to plant trees so we can consume fossil fuels guilt free. ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?

And apparently everyone else except me thinks this is a good thing.

It is a good thing that an entire industry and apparently a brand new consumer market has sprung up around the fact that we are happily destroying the environment?

What.
The.
Fuck.


Profit is going to save the world?