My friend, Jon Lebkowsky (an editor for the print version of bOING bOING) wrote a piece for World Changing about Renewable Choice's Wind Energy Cards, which I wrote about last week.
One of our readers was concerned about Renewable Choice Energy's Wind Power cards, which are sold in Whole Foods Market and have proved to be controversial, at least in some parts of the blogosphere. Mark Frauenfelder at bOING bOING posted that the cards are "useless…. When you buy a card, you don't get any wind-generated electricity delivered to your home however. In fact, all you get is a card that doubles as a refrigerator magnet. Actually, you don't even get any credits, it's just a word they use to give you a sense of getting something from your money." However I think Mark misunderstands the concept of offsetting, which is what the cards are about.If we take climate change seriously (and we should), we need to start to figure out how to reduce our overall energy use, get as much of the energy we use as possible through renewables, and remedy the remainder of our energy use in other ways.
We should all buy green energy. But sometimes, even if a utility has sources of green power, that source may be limited. Consider my local utility, Austin Energy. Even though their Green Choice program is considered one of the best green power programs in the USA, it can only handle a limited number of subscribers.
So what do you do if you can't connect directly to a provider of green power? One thing you can do is pay someone else to use renewable energy.
