Word: offseting
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...Bush's call to quintuple U.S. production of biofuels such as corn ethanol by 2017. The proposal is solid--to a point. You can't use biofuels without flex-fuel vehicles, and currently there aren't many out there. Plus, manufacturing ethanol is a messy process: smokestack pollution can offset what you save from tailpipes. An overall carbon cap would fix that, but even a greener Bush won't go there. "You dirty up a clean fuel if you manufacture it dirtily," says Sarah Hessenflow Harper, an Environmental Defense analyst and a former agricultural adviser for Senators Sam Brownback...
...clear and coherent way that we do it. We should have limits on donations that should apply to individuals, businesses and trade unions. I've suggested ?50,000 a year as the limit, and in response to that some modest state funding of political parties which you could offset by cutting the cost of politics, reducing the size of the House of Commons and cutting the amount that's spent during a general election. That is a sensible package and I hope others will take...
...demand is coming from." Stephen Roach, Morgan Stanley's chief economist and one of the most skeptical observers of the world economy, has long warned about the dangers of flagging U.S. demand. "The rest of the world doesn't have enough vigor in its private consumption" to offset U.S. declines, he says. Now he's concerned, too, about signs he sees of a possible Chinese slowdown, including a steep drop in the growth of investment spending and reduced gains in industrial output. A less dynamic China is one reason Roach thinks global growth this year will be "significantly below what...
...even that is easier said than done. How can ordinary consumers be sure that their contributions toward, say, building solar greenhouses in the Himalayas is money well spent? Without global or even national regulators becoming involved, standards in the offset industry have become a free-for-all. It seems obvious, for example, that a project should reduce emissions below the level that would have occurred without that project, a condition known as "additionality." But that's not always the case. Thanks to hazy interpretations of that proviso, "at least half" of current projects wouldn't meet a uniformly strict assessment...
...finite number of major global standards would be good news for consumers, even if they've been a little slow in coming. Big corporations and governments already benefit from a common system of approving offset projects under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. With a common set of rules, voluntary offsetting could see its ranks of followers - and the market's credibility - grow further. That's fine, say many environmental advocates, but they also say customers should be focusing more on cutting emissions in the first place. "Offsets can be seen as an easy...