Clif Bar helps Sea Otter Classic go Climate Neutral
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 04.25.06
Whoops, we missed this one by a couple of weeks. The team at Clif Bar, who we enthused about once or twice before, recently got it together with the Sea Otter Classic. Why? So they could make the ‘World's Largest Cycling Festival’ climate neutral. Clif Bar chipped in to purchase “enough clean wind energy to offset all of the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from participant travel to and from the event.” In short, they offset close to 748 tons of carbon dioxide. This was achieved with the assistance of NativeEnergy, who also offset the carbon loading inherent in the making of the movie Syriana. As they did for skiers, Clif Bar also provided Cool Tags for cyclists to offset their own 300 miles of car travel. Organic food bars, bicycles, a public event, wind energy, carbon offsets, for-profit businesses and personal responsibility, with 50-60,000 people all hanging out in the same brain space sounds just a TreeHugger sort of scene. Three Cheers to ::Clif Bar the ::Sea Otter Classic.
Wow! That is really cool! I love Cliff bars because their sooo tasty and dairy free and now I love them even more!!
"Purchasing environmental credits" seems to be the new cool thing for companies to do. Unfortunately, it's more or less a scam: you can't "buy back" smog. If you *really* want to reduce pollution, don't buy individually wrapped candy bars. :)
Thanks for posting this. It's yet another reason to choose Clif/Luna!
As James suggests, this whole business is indeed a scam when they claim to be "buying wind energy" when they are in fact spending far less and buying only tokens of wind energy.
I disagree with the "scam" comments. The government certainly isn't putting enough money into alternative energy. Who else is going to do it? Maybe the word "offsett" is being used loosely, but my research on the subject keeps me optimistic. For an in-depth article on the topic, check out "A Drive to Offset Emissions" by David Biello. I'm not too high tech so hopefully this link works:
http://ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/article.news.php?component_id=4192&component_version_id=6012&language_id=12