While keping it real, Mike makes mention of a website I hadn't heard of called TerraPass. Basically, they help you fund green research to counterbalance the damage you're doing to the planet with your car. Pollution credits for the masses.

This is completely fucked up. First, it rests on the fallacy that a dollar value can be assigned to everything. What is the price of clean air? How much research do you have to fund to clean up 10,000 lbs of carbon? Apparently, the total comes to something like $50/year.

How do they come up with that figure? No details are given. There is only a passing, vague reference to 'market mechanisms'. Well, here's one clue into their pricing structure: TerraPass isn't even a non-profit! WTF?

Even if you do buy into the universality of markets, you'd be way better off investing in green mutual funds. At least then you have some idea of where your money is going and who is skimming how much off the top.

But if the worst effect of TerraPass were to deprive a few naive hippies of a few dollars, I wouldn't have wasted so many keystrokes on it. No, what really has my bee in a bonnet here is that this kind of thing is likely to do far more harm than good.

Taken at face value, TerraPass promotes the belief that a bunch of guys in white labcoats somewhere are going to fix all of our problems with energy and pollution. It says "the problem is just technology, and we're good at technology. Don't worry about it, just go about your business." In fact, the best thing consumers can do is to go on consuming, in this case by buying a brand-new product from TerraPass.

Meanwhile, they can get back in the SUV and forget about it until next year.