The mother of all indulgence articles

As much as we gripe about the whole indlugence thing, we’re not entirely humorless. The crazy kids at NPR’s Living on Earth did a segment recently on the Ford deal entitled “Carbon Confessionals” that they bookended between some fairly amusing sketch comedy:

MAN: Bless me, Father Phillip, for I have sinned. It’s been only 200 miles since my last Carbon Confessional.

PHILLIP: May the good Ford forgive you, my son. For your penance read the Kyoto Protocol and sign up for TerraPass. Now drive off in peace.

Phillip/fill-up, get it? TerraPass hearts puns. Anyway, give it a listen. As an added bonus, the piece features an interview with the shadowy and media-averse Karl Ulrich, the Wharton professor who midwifed TerraPass. Hi, Karl!

On the other hand, Newsweek chimes in with the mother of all indulgence stories, a purported satire by columnist Brad Stone that manages to equate driving with obesity, child sweatshop labor, the Enron fraud, Iran’s nuclear program, marital infidelity…I’m actually making it sound a lot more interesting than it is.

Stone has done some good reporting in the past on clean energy. For example, his piece on the economics of wind energy highlights exactly the problem that TerraPass members help to address:

Politics, as much as innovation, governs new energy policy. While European governments heavily subsidize wind production, the United States still funnels far greater resources into tax breaks for oil companies, and has even recently allowed the wind-production tax credit to expire….But the most important task, [Clipper Windpower founder Jim] Dehlsen thinks, is to continue to drive costs down and efficiencies up, so that the attraction of wind becomes irresistible.

TerraPass member funds go to cover this cost gap, helping to make these wind energy projects possible today. To his credit, Stone has been responsive to our emails, and says that he sees a role for carbon offsets in addressing climate change. He also drives a Honda Civic Hybrid, when it isn’t in the hands of suprisingly clever car thieves.