Environment Versus The Bottom Line – Weird Wall Street Trading Markets
Carbon Footprint… Species Footprint?
A Carbon offset is a nebulous thing, but it does have measurements: tons of C02, years you can produce. This raises some questions about how one can verify the veracity of a bank. How long does the new place have to be “guaranteed safe” before the permanent destruction of a previous habitat is deemed acceptable? What happens if a species that was on the endangered list makes a come back? Does that mean your offset credit is now worthless? Man, I hope Wall Street has some idea of how to defray the risks inherent in biology.
Unlike with carbon, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of voluntary market for these credits. People who want to conserve manage to find some way to, well, conserve. They find ways to make projects that don’t involve the destruction of habitats and species. This means that this entire market is all based on government regulations and the things that the feds deem worthy of protection. I guess that, in our capitalist driven society, placing a monetary value on something seems to be the only way to move from an adversarial debate between business and environmentalism. After all, as Douglas Adams said: “You’ve got to build bypasses”.
Image: via Dou, flickr.com creative commons license
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